Brussels

After a pre-dawn flight we arrived on a completely different planet. After spending the last three months in Mexico, Italy and Spain in rather temperate weather with familiar Mediterranean cultures, we were thrust into the icy chill and unfamiliar surroundings of central Europe. The weather was right at a crisp 0, but not to worry, it would warm up to 2 that day. Two, it's going to be freakin 2 today! That is the problem with celcius, it just sounds too damn cold.

On the bus ride from the airport to the city it started to snow a bit then it was just an icy blanket. We looked at each other with a bit of trepidation, but we knew this was coming and had prepared for it.

Brussels is a big international city that is the home to NATO and the EU (probably because it is in between all the big heavy hitter countries of Europe). It was way more diverse than we had expected. This was one thing that we encountered again and again in many cities we went to. I fall into a mindset that many European countries are homogeneous, but this is certainly not the case, especially in the major population centers. Not as broadly diverse as the US, but there are definitely enclaves of immigrants from all over. Brussels is also home to the language battle between Flemmish (Dutch basically) and French. This is a huge rift in Belgium and is always simmering below the surface. Brussels is right in the middle of all this and as a result, all the streets have two names. Now, this makes it horribly difficult to find your way around with a map. The street names are real long in two completely foreign languages, and as many streets do, they change names from block to block. Now, on a map of winding downtown city streets it may not be very practical to list both names on the map so sometimes you get one or both and you can never really tell exactly where you are.

Well, we came to Belgium for one thing: Beer, chocolate and fries. Well I guess that is like three things. We walked around the beautiful central quarter in the rain and killed time eating chocolate and fries until it was a respectable hour to drink. With the sky overcast it starts getting dark at 4 so no need to wait until 5 for the first drink I think. We went to a 'beer museum' that was the price of a beer and that is basically all we got. A little movie on the Belgium lambic beers and the history of monks and beer and we moved on to the tasting room. They have two 'mystery' beers on tap that rotate out each week. One was an amber and the other a cherry beer. Now this was a wonderful discovery. I have drank cherry beer before, the Sam Adam's Cherry Wheat comes to mind, but this was something else entirely. A full bodied Belgique Lambic with a slightly tart, slightly sweet cherry taste. It was absolutely delicious, and we would go on to try every variety of this beer that we could find.

We ate the national dish of Belgium which are mussels and fries. One bright point of suffering through this weather is that it is mussel season and they were plump and delicious, cooked in a light broth of white wine, butter and garlic, just enough to give it some flavor but not to overpower the mussels. Brooke and I agreed that these were easily the best mussels we have ever eaten.

Maybe everybody already knows this, but Belgium Waffles are actually a thing that people in Belgium eat. I thought it was something like a Spanish Omlette or canned Vienna Sausages, neither of which are eaten in their respective locales. We were pleased to find big, crisp fluffy waffles sold everywhere on the street and which are at their best when sugar and butter are baked in. There are chocolate shops everywhere and every now and then we would walk in and pick up a few individual pieces and munching on them until we ran out and then picking up a few more.

Comics are really big here and I knew that Belgium was home to that irrepressible do gooder TinTin but we discovered it was also home to those little blue hallucinations, The Smurfs. Who knew, I always thought they were American.

Belgium is horridly expensive and every museum is too. We did go to a musical instrument museum which was a bit different. You are issued a pair of headphones, and when you stand in front of a display of an instrument, a sample of that music plays. It was huge and fairly interesting, showing the instruments that we are all familiar with, and several that have fallen out of favor. Other than that, not too much was done. One day we were going to see the official buildings of EU and NATO but it was just pouring rain and freezing, so we spent the day in a cafe playing chess. This was actually a fine experience as spending a day in a warm cafe in a French speaking region with good food and coffee, playing chess and watching the locals is a fine way to pass the time.

We took every opportunity we had to try different beers. After drinking relatively schwilly Spanish and Italian beers we were glad to be in a country that produced a multitude of delicous beers. We went to a bar that had over 200, but only managed to drink into the double digits. Sure, we went to an 'Irish Pub' one night, but happy hour lasted until 1am and they served only Belgium beers. The beer culture here is to be envied. Beer is taken very, very seriously. Most every beer a bar serves has it's own type of glass. A beer is never drank from the bottle, but carefully poured into it's glass to give the right amount of head. If a beer is poured from the tap and it overflows, it is dipped into water and cleaned off. If the head rises above the glass (which it almost always does) it is cleared flat with a knife. When the beer is finally presented to you it tastes that much sweeter. The night we were at the 'Irish' bar, it was actually halloween. Not terribly popular here, but between the expats and some fun-loving locals it is taking off a bit. There were plenty of people dressed up in relatively cliche outfits as well as the occassional Smurf or two. Smurf Yeah! All the revelry must have confused me, because when I went to the bathroom I somehow ignored the three giant signs that indicated that this was the ladies bathroom. I was still oblivious as I went in because their were individual locked rooms with stalls and this being Europe I just figured it was a co-ed bathroom. As I was washing my hands in the communal area a woman was giving me a real funny look and it slowly dawned on me what I had done. I quickly made my way out, head slunk low, hoping that people would think I was just dressed up as a guy. Brooke laughed at my idiocy, but I didn't feel to bad, hell I am in Belgium and somebody sitting next to me is painted blue.