Last Day In Belgium!

As some of you might be able to tell, all of us (except Bryan) have made it back to the US and have had a chance to hit the gym to start working off the copious amount of food we’ve eaten over the past three weeks. Thankfully I chose July 5th to fly back instead of July 6th (which we initially considered) with all of the craziness at SFO. Anyway, enough about the present.

Our failure the previous day to get out of the house on time made us a bit more determined to get out of the house early. We caught the bus from Brasschaat to Antwerp, where we caught the train to Brugge. I’ll be perfectly honest. I had never heard of Brugge before the trip. When the day started, I was still thinking that we should forget Brugge and make it over to Brussels to recover from the previous days failure to launch. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was a very interesting city with quite a bit of history. It had cobblestone roads, towering churches, and just enough action to keep us American tourists busy for the day.

I’m not sure if it was because we actually hungry or because we had become conditioned to try the food at every stop, but the first thing we did was find lunch (and of course a beer) at (insert Flemish word for Large Market). After lunch we walked through the main parts of the city to take in the sites and see the outside of a few large cathedrals (I enjoyed a little corner of town that was home to large populations of swans an ducks, people who know me know that I like ducks).

Bryan informed me that Brugge was known for its fine Belgian chocolates, so we spent part of the afternoon getting a taste for the local chocolates and stocking up for loved ones back home. We found what Google told us was the best chocolate place in the city. I haven’t made my way through all of the chocolates yet, but the vodka lime flavored praline was the best/most interesting one I’ve tried so far.

With just a few hours left before our return train left, Yelp directed us to a local brewery name Brugse Zot. I had never heard of this beer, but the menu boasted of all the awards it had won. We sat, drank some good beer, ate a few more chocolates, and chatted a bit about all the places we had been and how it was the last time we would see each other for a while. The three of us were pretty exhausted. We had covered quite a bit of ground in three weeks (and Bryan still only half done).

We finished our beer and meandered our way back to the train station. After a train ride, a bus ride, and a 15 minute walk, we arrived back to find that Bryan’s aunt and grandma had made us delicious dinner of fish with mustard sauce and potatoes. And of course, for our last night in Belgium, Bryan’s grandma served the three of us Belgian waffles with whipped cream for dessert.

We spent the rest of the night packing our backpacks, which for me meant finding a way to fit four 750 mL Belgian beer bottles in with my already-stuffed backpack.

We woke up at 5:30 to eat a quick breakfast and say our goodbyes before Cipriano and I left of the Brussels airport. Most people agree that the most frustrating part of air travel is the long waits or having to put up with TSA. For the Brussels airport, the most frustrating part (for me) was trying to decide which duty free Belgian chocolates I could fit in my carry-on.

After about 24 hours of travel (from door to door) I made back to Modesto. It was a great trip. I had a spectacular time traveling with three friends (even more when I count the Brits). We saw a number of spectacular cities, ate some incredible (and some not so incredible) food, and met many interesting people. Even though it was a great trip, I was especially happy to collapse at the end of the day in my own bed.

Westmalle Brewery

We were planning to go to Brussels today, but trough a series of unfortunate events, were unable to make it.  Instead, we went to a local brewery, the Westmalle brewery.

We woke up a bit early (9 AM), in order to have enough time to catch a train to Brussels.  Unfortunately, searching for a wallet that was left in Rotterdam forced us to leave the house quite late.  We ended up getting out around 11:00 - 11:30 AM.  My Aunt drove us to the nearby train station in Brecht, where we hoped to grab a train to Antwerp.  However, the next train to Brussels left at 2 PM, which was way too late, so we decided to go to the Westmalle brewery instead.

Since it's a monastery, the brewery was inaccessible to the public.  However, there was a place to eat across the street from it

Their signature beer is a mix of half Westmalle Trippel and half Westmalle Dubbel

The restaurant

After eating, we went for a beautiful walk around the fields near the monastery

 After finishing our tour, we returned to the house, had a long dinner and headed to bed.

-Bryan

Amsterdam

Today we visited Amsterdam.  It was nice, but we had to wake up way too early to catch the train (around 7).  We were tired as you can see and slept on the train:

The train ride was fairly long - about 2-2.5 hours, so we slept on the train.  Once we got to Amsterdam, it was around noon, so we grabbed a quick lunch near the central square.

We had some Amsterdam beer

I had a garlic steak.  It was ehhh...

After walking around the red light district and seeing the various raunchy sights of Amsterdam, we made our way to the Anne Frank house, passing by the Homomonument on the way:

Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed at the Anne Frank house, but I think Kevin snuck some ;).  It was quite a good museum, but didn't discuss much more than just the layout of the house that Anne was hiding in.

After the museum, we took a canal cruise to see some of the beautiful architecture of the city

Our boat

A huge parking garage for bikes

After the canal, we headed home - this was an adventure.  It turned out we had been given the wrong information regarding the train times back to Antwerpen.  We ended up taking a train through Rotterdam back to Roosendaal instead, and my Aunt had to pick us up :/

Once we got home, we had a quick dinner and then headed to bed.

-Bryan

Antwerp!

Quick post since I'm tired

We are waiting to for the bus to take us to Antwerp

Kevin looking around downtown

This is a statue of the hand of Antwerp.  There is a legend of a giant that guarded the Scheldt river into Antwerp, until a brave boy chopped his hand off and threw it away.

The large central market where we had lunch

Central market

We had some beers with our lunch

Next we saw some churches

We picked CP up from the train station

We had some food in Brasschaat, courtesy of Oma and Aunt Mich

A bunker!

Then we went for a lovely walk

-Bryan

Road to Belgium

We packed our bags, swept the floors, and grabbed one last chocolate croissant from the bakery downstairs before we caught the metro to Gare du Nord train station. I think Bryan mentioned this a few posts back, but let me reiterate the ridiculousness of our travel day. Our final destination was Antwerp. For some reason we thought it was a good idea to save a some money (on the order of 90 euros) by taking an irregular route. This route consisted of five trains with four layovers, meaning we would see the inside of 6 train stations between Paris and Antwerp. Three of these stops had layovers of an hour or more. We started out our day exhausted just thinking about the day ahead.

The cafe at the Gare du Nord

The first train took us from Paris to Lille, France, where we had just enough time to find our second train before it left the station. Our ticket said we were only supposed to be on the next train for 15 minutes, followed by a two hour layover. We realized after flipping through our book of tickets that our third train for the day was even more ridiculous. It consisted of a six minute train ride across the France-Belgium boarder followed by a one hour layover. So altogether, we were looking at 21 minutes of travel in about 3 and a half hours (I needed to keep reminding myself of how dirt-cheap these tickets were).

It turned our that our second train continued on to one of our later stops, and the ticket taker had already come by to check the tickets, so we saved ourselves a little trouble by breaking the rules and staying on the train for an extra six minutes.

We had three hours to kill in the small town of Mouscron in the French-speaking part of Belgium. We walked a few blocks from the train station to find we had three options for lunch: an overly-expensive Chinese food restaurant, a Belgian fast food restaurant called "Belga Frites", and a bar. We decided to go native and try Belga Frites.

Belga Frites was an experience. Underneath a glass case they had just about every meat you can imagine. In addition to every meat you can imagine, they also had every meat you can image but ground up and formed into various patties, sausages, or bizarre zig-zaging shapes on skewers. After looking through our options, Bryan and I decided that the chicken burger was the least risky option. We also ordered a side of fries (I will abstain from calling them french fries because I recently learned that fries are originally from Belgium). The chicken burger was just about the same as any chicken sandwich you might get at a fast food restaurant. The quantity of fries that were served in a "small" side of french fries could best be described as a bucket. We were only able to finish about half of a single order between the two of us. I also learned that Belgians like to eat their fries with mayonnaise. I tried it, but I think I will continue to eat my fries with ketchup.

We had a beer after lunch

We finished our lunch, grabbed a beer at the pub next door (Belgian beer is some of the best I've ever had, and to top it off, it's waaaaaay inexpensive here) and got on our second to last train. On this train ride, Bryan and I had an entire train car to ourselves.

I'll spare you the details of our last few hours on the train and suffice it to say we made it to Antwerp! Bryan's aunt gave us a warm welcome at the station and drove us to her home in Brasschaat, Belgium. Here we were greeted by Bryan's Oma (his grandma, an energetic, 90 year old lady who despite only speaking Flemish and French, managed to make me laugh all through dinner), a delicious lasagna (which was no doubt a product of the years Bryan's aunt spent living in Italy), and (you guessed it) more Belgian beer! Staying with Bryan's family is a nice change of pace for our trip. We followed dinner by a walk through a nearby park, but quickly made it back for a nice 10 hour night's sleep in the most comfortable bed we have slept on this trip.

My Oma made us a cake!

We went for a lovely little walk after dinner