Flying with Smith

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 17^th.  It was written partly on the train to Dusseldorf and partly in Vienna on July 17^th.  Woo-hoo I’m all caught up!

Today has been a go-go-go-getstuffdone kind of day.  I woke up at 7:45, thanks to all that sleep from yesterday.  I made breakfast while Smith got ready for work.   I packed up all my dirty clothes and tried to go get laundry done.  Smith has a washing machine, but no dryer, and I couldn’t pack wet clothes.  I had found 2 places that seemed like they might be Laundromats on google, but I wasn’t sure of either of them.  So I marked them both on the map and headed out.  My suspicions were correct.  Wash Wash Laundry didn’t exist, and the other place didn’t look like a Laundromat from the door on the side of a warehouse in an industrial park.

So I rode to the tourist information office, which fortunately was very close by.  The same 2 ladies were working there as last week.  And they gave me great news that a laundromat named de Groene Golf (pronounced duh-Huh-roon-Holf) was on the same street that Smith lives on.  So I rode there, but was a little nervous when the storefront had no washing machines or pictures of anything laundry related, and I saw an old man working at a sewing machine through the window.  But thank god, it was a laundromat.  The old lady was nice and helped me with the machines.  The only English she seemed to know was “It’s nothing” whenever I said “Thank you”.

Clothes were clean and I was back at Smith’s by noon.  I packed up and headed down to the middle of town to see the market and grab some lunch.  I had a Vietnamese egg roll (named “loempia”), then some fresh fried fish from a vendor that was cleaning the fish, and then selling it either raw to take home, or fried to eat.  I also got some other fried seafood from them, that I’m guessing were some kind of prawn.  They were somewhere between giant shrimp and tiny lobster tails with a texture and flavor more like the lobster.  The market was an interesting mix.  Items as touristy as clogs to those as un-touristy as batteries and printer ink cartridges.  But overall your typical mix of produce, fresh meat, cheese, bread, fried foods, and clothing.  The lamp shade booth was a new one.  

After eating I walked around the market and through the center of town one last time.  I rode home.  The internet was cooperating, so I booked our rental car.  Then Smith got home, we finished packing and walked to the train station.  That was exhausting for me, because I’m packing so much more than Smith.  But we got on the train nonetheless.

The ride was uneventful. We got to our gate an hour and 45 minutes before our flight.  Grabbed some food and beers.  Then we flew together, for the first time.  Smith realized that we had ridden on trains, in buses, on boats, in cars, but never together on a plane.  So we did that.  Got into Vienna about 11.  Picked up our bags and walked out to find a beautiful sight: a man holding a sign saying “PhD Brian Roberts”.  Hell yeah.  We had ordered a taxi, and it worked like a charm.  He walked us out to the black Mercedes.  We hopped in.  The driver already had the address, so he punched it into his GPS, and 20 minutes later we were dropped off at Moran’s parents’ apartment in Vienna.  For 29 euros that was an amazing service.

Once here, Moran’s parents showed us around the apartment.  We get free air mattress beds, shower, they’ve offered us food, laundry service, free calling back home.  The ONLY downside is that I can’t connect my computer to the internet here to blog.  So I will have to find an internet café to post these.  Moran’s parents also spent a good 40 minutes telling us about the cool things they’ve done or seen, or eaten around town so I think we have a good list of things to do.  Which is great because we did NO planning for this part of the trip.

Well, it’s nearly 1:30, and we have a city to take on tomorrow.  I’m going to sleep.

Returning to Enschede

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 16^th.  I wrote it while on the train on July 17^th.

Monday was probably the worst day on the trip so far.  I say that in the understanding that any day on this vacation is still pretty awesome.  I woke up to Smith’s alarm at 7:30.  I REALLY didn’t want to get up.  But I was already running late.  So I threw my stuff into my 2 bags as fast as possible, paid the hotel bill on the way out, tried to grab breakfast at the place we’d gone to on Sunday but couldn’t because it wasn’t open yet, and hurried to the train station.  We snagged some breakfast there and waited for our train to show up on the big board to know which platform to go to.  But our train’s time was changed by 2 minutes, so we were really unsure as to whether to get on the train to Antwerp at 8:20 or one of the 2 trains that left at our given departure time of 8:22.  After a few frantic minutes we were able to learn that yes, the Antwerp/Amsterdaam train would stop in Roosendaal.  So we boarded that one.

This train was laid out differently.  Instead of one long aisle down the middle with pairs of seats on either side, the seats were placed in a series of compartments.  Each compartment had six seats, three facing three others.  This made for a miserable trip.  There was no air circulation within the compartments.  We were full, all 6 seats were taken.  So I was sweating, and cramped with no way to stretch out my legs.  The seats had no recline at all, so I couldn’t sleep.  I read, really just because I needed a way to pass the time.  Fortunately, we changed trains in Roosendaal after an hour in that train.  The new train had a lot of space.  So I slept and read and generally enjoyed having 2 seats to myself.  Just like on the way out, we changed trains in Zupfelt and Hengelo.  We caught a bus from the Enschede train station because we didn’t feel like walking.  Although smelling the kebab we had gotten at the train station and not being allowed to eat it on the bus was almost as bad as walking the 30 minutes.

We got back to Smith’s place.  Ate.  He went to work.  I meant to blog, but ended up sleeping and reading instead.  He got back from work.  We ordered pizzas: mafiosa style, doner kebab style, and with chorizo.  We drank some beer, spent a lot of time online planning transportation and lodging for our upcoming adventures.

Brussels: A Little More Relaxed

Authors’ note: This post covers the day of July 15^th.  I wrote it on July 17^th on the train to the airport.

Sunday was a bit more relaxing and enjoyable.  We woke up and wandered to a café really close to our hotel.  I suppose I hadn’t mentioned this before, but our hotel was such a steal.  We were about 2 minutes walking time from Grande Place.  We got our own private room with 2 twin beds, our own bathroom and shower, and all for 60 euros a night.  You’d pay 25 euros a night at most hostels for a shared room, shared shower, and no security for your stuff.   Granted, we’re missing out on the hostel atmosphere, but seeing as how we’re already traveling with a friend, I don’t feel like we’re missing out on a lot.

So, breakfast was awesome.  The café was simply called “Paul”.  Smith said he saw another one, so it must be a chain, but the inside was still incredibly unique.  We ate upstairs and it seemed that we were amongst locals just chatting away on a Sunday morning.  We each got the almond chocolate bread that was delicious.

After breakfast we walked to the Mannekin Pis.  Just wanted to take a picture of it without the stupid French costume.  Then we walked to the cathedral.  Mass was being conducted so we couldn’t go past the first section, which sucked, but it was pretty cool to see, hear, and feel the organ being played and the choir singing.

From there we did a little shopping.   Can’t say who bought what.  Don’t want to spoil any surprises.  But we did buy some chocolate for our own consumption.  Then we stopped off at the hotel before heading to lunch.  We wandered through Rue de Bouchers and the alley off of it, and chose the place with the least pushy waiters waiting outside, and where they were advertising something other than seafood.  Smith got a quarter of a rabbit cooked in a Gueuze sauce (gueuze is a type of beer).  I got a Flemish stew with chicken, very creamy with leeks and potatoes.  It was all I could do to finish my meal.

After eating we walked to Grande Place to get some info as to how to get to the Horta Museum.  By their recommendation, we walked up to the Museum of Fine Art and caught a tram to the museum.  We tried to figure out how to pay for our ride on the tram but couldn’t find a place or way to pay for a ticket, so we ended up scamming the city of Brussels for a couple euro ride on the tram.  The tram was beautiful, obviously brand new.

The Horta museum was awesome.  For those who don’t know (and I didn’t before Sunday) Horta was an architect in the early 20^th century that pushed Art Nouveau.  So this museum was his home and studio for a while.  I wish we were allowed to take pictures, but sadly we were not.  I love museums like this, where the building itself seems like a living work of art.  I love seeing all the spaces from as many different angles as possible to see how it all fits together.  I love trying to figure out what about that room or design makes it so great and so unique and what I could do to replicate that in the apartment or home I get later in life.

This house was built around a central square spiral staircase with translucent glass at the top to allow a lot of natural light to permeate the house.  Every room off the central staircase is at a slightly different level than the ones next to it.  So it’s really hard to say how many floors it had, or which rooms were on which floor.  But that makes the space so interesting to look at.  The very bottom floor was just a coat closet.  The next rooms were more for entertaining, with the dining room and a large living room, called the music room.  Roughly on the same floor was Horta’s office and reception area.  The next rooms up were an entire apartment, with a bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, boudoir, and smaller living room.  The top floor contained Horta’s bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, study, and a greenhouse.  Distinct things I remember include the Gothic arches in the dining room and leading into the music room.  Crown molding on the ceiling instead of on the walls in the private apartment.  The golden light that permeated the whole space, assisted by yellow panes of glass on top of the staircase gold and yellow paint and wallpaper, and the extensive use of light wood, like American Ash in a lot of the furniture.  The ceiling in the dining room was made to look like it was constructed out of a thousand tiny little bricks.

After the Horta museum, we took the tram back, again gipping Brussels out of a couple euros.  Walking back from the tram we passed a couple doing wedding photos around town.  They were buying and eating waffles.  We then passed the rest of the wedding party waiting patiently.  We then bought some chocolate and got waffles and ate them on the Grande Place.

We dropped stuff off at the hotel, and then the drinking began.  We went to the Delirium Café and had 4 beers each, eating our chocolates while drinking the beer.  We started with a Delirium tremens and nocturnum.  Then I had a light (and I mean really light) slightly lemony Rulles Blonde, while Smith had the honeysweet Barbar.  ThenI got the Trouffette Rousse and Smith got the Guillotine Bitter (to be honest I don’t remember what these tasted like at all).  Then I went for the Chouffe Houblon IPA, and Smith got the Pink Killer (probably the best sour ale I’ve had, and by that I mean the least sour).  At that point we decided to take a break and get some food.  We walked to the kebab place just across the street from our hotel.  We ordered, then sat down to wait for our food, when Smith suddenly panicked.  He had lost his wallet.

At first I thought he was joking, because let’s be honest, that would be a total Smith thing to do.  But when he left the restaurant to go back to Delirium I knew it was serious.  He was gone for a few minutes, when I started to pray.  And even though I know God has better things to do with his time than help rich Americans find their wallets while on vacation in Europe, Smith tapped me on the shoulder as I finished my prayer, with his wallet in hand.  He had somehow dropped it while sitting at the bar in Delirium and when he had returned it was still on the floor under his seat.  He is one lucky mother@#$%&*.  Now that all was right with the world again, we settled down to eating our kebab, and then to go drinking again.

After dinner we decided to try some of these other bars that had been recommended to us.  The first one was recommended by someone at the tourist info office, but the atmosphere there wasn’t great.  The waiters were trying to be cool, sagging pants and whatnot, and I just realized I sound like an old man when I say that, but whatever.  The beer was still good but we decided to move on.  We stopped off at the hotel before heading to two cellar bars that had been recommended online.  The first one we went to was closed, but the second one turned out to be a hidden gem, because there I got to drink a Westvletern.  According to some beer buffs, the monks of Westvletern brew the best beer in the world.  Thing is, they don’t want to get rich off of it, just make enough money to keep their abbey and charities running smoothly.  So, they only sell it in Westvletern by appointment.  And if you’re found reselling their beer, they will never sell to you again.  So, I don’t know how/why this bar had this beer.  But considering we didn’t have the time to devote an entire day to driving out to Westvletern, I decided to pay the 10 euros to try one.  It was delicious.  A lot of different flavors perfectly in balance so that no one flavor was dominant.  It was 10% alcohol but you couldn’t taste it.  It had a great long finish, and I was sad to see it go.

With our cash reserves all but spent, we decided it was better to head to a place that would take credit cards.  So, we went back to Delirium, passing that same wedding party again, but decided to patronage the downstairs Delirium bar instead.  There we had a few more beers (I want to say 3, but maybe 4).  And to be honest I can’t remember them all.  I know I had an Applebocq that tasted like Granny Smith apple juice and beer and a Rochefort 8, because it was the best non-Westvletern beer I’d had in Brussels.  Smith says he had a Buffalo Stout, but that he can’t remember any others.  You have to understand, this bar held the world record for most different types of beer commercially available.  We’re talking thousands of different bottled beers kept in a giant walk-in regfrigerator and a book that you have to read to try to pick out what beer you want.  The people next to us at the bar purchased one of these beer novels for 5 euros.  They were an Irish couple.  She works in Antwerp and he was down visiting for a week.  This bar was obviously very young, very cool, very international.  I’d expect that fully ¾ of the people there were students trekking around Europe.  The walls were covered in beer trays, with no duplicates, so it was pretty awesome when we were able to pick out the PBR tray.  But surprisingly no PBR on the menu, though they did have the standard American Bud, Coors, Miller, Michelob, Sam Adams, and then a range of offerings from a few microbreweries.

Drunk and happy we returned to our hotel, comforted by the knowledge that we had done Brussels right.

Trying to See Brussels in a Day

Authors’s note:  This post covers the day of July 14^th.  I wrote it while doing laundry on July 17^th.

Boy, the 14^th was a hell of a day.

We got up a little late, around 10.  It was raining a bit, so we walked to the gallery to eat at a café there under the overhang.  I had a huge breakfast of an omelette, a croissant, coffee, and orange juice.  That big meal turned out to be a great decision.  I think we were mostly among tourists at this café.  There was English being spoken next to us, as well as Spanish.  But there seemed to be a couple locals as well.

After breakfast we walked through Grande Place for the first time.  It’s quite impressive.  You can see the spire of one of the buildings reaching above the skyline as you walk towards it, but there is no grand entrance to the square, just a bunch of alleys cluttered with waffle shops, chocolate shops, lace stores, collectible beer stores, and tourist knick-knacks.  So you don’t see it coming until you emerge from one of those alleyways onto the square itself.  And suddenly the ornate facades are right in front of you in all their detailed glory.  Every square inch of every building around you is decorated is some kind of sculpture, design, or gold leaf accent.

After seeing Grande Place, we walked down to see the Mannekin Pis.  The stretch of road between the two holds even more tourist shops and lace and waffles and chocolate.  We came around the corner to get our first view of this bafflingly famous statue, and what do we see, but the boy is dressed up in black pants, blue and white striped shirt, red scarf, black beret, and holding a baguette under his right arm!  A passing tour guide explained to us that it was Bastille Day, so the Belgians had dressed their little town mascot in honor of the people who gave them one of their many languages.

Overall, the statue is relatively unimpressive.  It’s a boy peeing, with a smile on his face.  The statue is only 2 feet tall, and the crowds are pretty thick.  Maybe this little boy is the first case of being famous just for being famous?  You know, paving the way for the Ryan Seacrests of the world.  I guess its just something you have to see in Brussels, and then you move on.  There are better ways to spend your time.

So, with those two Brussels landmarks out of the way, we really only had one mandatory one left, and that was the Atomium.  We stopped off at the hotel room to recharge and figure out how we were going to get there.  I had the Atomium brochure that recommended taking the Metro line 1 to line 6, and you’re there.  Smith said, “No, we’ll walk it.  And we’ll go through the park on the way”.  And I failed to investigate further.  I agreed, and so the long walk of Brussels 2012 began.  I figured that if any sane person wanted to walk it, it couldn’t be more than a mile or 2 at the most.  After 30 minutes and while walking next to the industrial park on the Brussels canal, I realized that we were nowhere near the Atomium, and nowhere near this park that Smith had spoken of, and that this was about to get a whole lot worse before it got better.  We did see a small park and a church along the way, but I’m pretty sure we would have seen those had we taken the sightseeing bus that passed us again and again on our trek.  An hour and 15 minutes later, we caught sight of the Atomium.  But the thing is so big, it was another 15 minutes until we were actually there.

The tour there was interesting.  A mixture of the history of Expo ’58 and the creation of the building, and their temporary exhibit on the increasing competition for water in the world.  The best part about the building is of course seeing it, seeing the view from the top of it, oh, and the light show tunnel.

We took the metro back from the Atomium, and at this point it was almost 5.  And we’d had nothing to eat since breakfast.  That’s why that big breakfast turned out to be key.  For dinner we went to a cellar restaurant on the Grande Place that Frommer’s had recommended.  It was good.  We got herring filets in cream with apple and onion slices as an appetizer.  Then I had a stoempe, which is a mashed potato and vegetable mixture (my guess is that it includes carrot and parsnip in addition to the potatoes) with a Flemish beef and onion stew on the side.  It was amazing, really hearty, just what I needed.

Recharged from dinner, we headed off to see the European parliament before it got dark.  We passed some more amazing buildings, including the Museum of Fine Art and the Royal Palace.  We walked through a park that had a large gazebo where people were waltzing and tangoing (is that a word).

The European parliament was deathly silent.  It makes sense that on a Saturday of a week that it’s not in session would be quiet, but I joked that we were hearing the sound of problems NOT being solved.

We wandered through the complex and into the park just beyond it.  I thought it was pretty cool to see kids playing basketball in the shadow of the European Parliament building, just like I’ve always thought it would be cool to play in a DC sports league so I could play while in sight of the Capitol.

On the other side of the park we went to Place Jourdanplein to get fries from the place most recommended.  They were pretty awesome.  Double fried in some kind of fat or lard, no junk vegetable oil here, and served with your choice of sauce and a little tiny fork.

After those fries we were insanely thirsty, so we grabbed a beer from a café there on Place Jourdanplein before heading back.  That was really nice.  To relax with a full stomach, a cold beer, in a part of town that was authentically Belgian, a few tourists around, but really just the ones that came for the fries.  A couple sitting next to us saying hi to a passing woman on the street, a little boy too young for a real bike using his feet for balance and propulsion on a bike with no pedals, the waiter and a patron arguing over the counting out a big pile of change to pay for his drinks, a group of young teenagers doing stepovers and backheels with a soccer ball as they pass before meeting another group and greeting each other with a mixture of handshakes, hugs, and fist bumps, an accordion player setting up and coercing most of the patrons to chip in a coin or two (I was no exception).  It was truly enjoyable to take in all of this.

The sun was just beginning to set, so around 9, when we started back.  Walked back through the old buildings and the park, where even more people were dancing now.  Then back to Grande Place to eat waffles, mine with strawberries and chocolate, Smith’s without the fruit.

But we still weren’t done.  We still hadn’t had any beers.  So, we went to A La Becasse, a cellar bar Smith had found a recommendation for.  It was a very cool, old space.  The waiter wore a full on body apron that looked like a tunic that a Middle Ages knight would wear.  We had three beers each.  We started with a St. Feullien.  Then Smith had the white lambic, while I had their house specialty, which was a Doux Lambic.  It is a sour ale, which is not my favorite, but it has a distinct apple juice flavor to it.  After that, Smith had a Chimay, and I had a Leffe.  I’m struggling to remember what varieties of those beers we had, but I do know that the I was struggling to stay awake.  The only reason I got the last 2 beers was because my brain kept telling me, “You may never be back in Brussels, you have to experience as much as possible.”

Finally, we walked back through Grande Place to see it at night.

So, a little after midnight, we returned to our hotel, and crashed.  Hard.