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