Adventuring Abroad: Belgium! Brussels

We took a 5 day trip to Belgium at the end of June! We traveled with our friends Jerome & Erin, as well their baby Gus, and Erin's sister JJ and her boyfriend Duane. We left on a Wednesday morning, taking the train from the Huntingdon station to King's Cross, then taking the Eurostar train through the Channel Tunnel (Chunnel!). It's a 2 hour journey from London to Brussels, which seemed surprisingly short for going all the way to the continent. Charlotte was good on the journey, and was sleepy enough to take a short nap on the way.

We struggled a bit at the Brussels train station to figure out how to take a metro to the office where we could pick up the keys to our rental apartment. Poor signage and a somewhat complex combination of buses, above ground metro trams, and below ground subway trains, and machines that only take debit cards... we were glad when we got to the apartment! We had rented a place in the center of the town, near the Manneken Pis statue and the Grand Place square.

Charlotte enjoyed playing in the (non-functional) fireplace

That grin!

The "Tin Tin" mural directly outside our apartment windows.
We were in the apartment with the lowest set of windows in the picture.

We enjoyed being able to walk around the tourist center, where there are a lot of streets blocked off to allow for pedestrians to walk. We went out the afternoon we arrived to get some famous fries (frites) with mayonnaise and Belgian beer at a small bar in an alley that was advertised as the oldest bar in Brussels. We quickly found the fun of trying "degustations" -- sample trays of a variety of the Belgian beer. I really enjoyed most of the beers we tried across the trip, but especially Kwak and La Trappe, as well as some of the brands of Kriek (cherry beer) and Framboise (raspberry beer). We also enjoyed the other delicious treats famous in Belgium -- chocolate and waffles! Oh, and chocolate on waffles :)

The chocolate shop directly across from our apartment

A display of waffle options in Brussels!

The sign in the shop next door... they clearly have had to clean up some waffle messes before!

The Grand Place consists of a very broad square with beautiful buildings around it. We walked through there multiple times on our way to meals; there were a lot of tourists and selfie sticks around the place!

Later in the afternoon on the first day, we went for a walk down toward the famous "Manneken Pis" statue, which was only about 75 yards from the entrance to our apartment. It is a lot smaller than I expected -- in fact, we saw some fake chocolate Manneken figurines in shop windows that were larger. Not really sure who is purchasing those!

We then came across a very random street fair/party that was celebrating Quebec. Yep, Quebec, Canada. There were lots of tents set up, some of which were selling Quebecois beer. We stopped and celebrated Quebec too! (Charlotte was not so sure.)

The next day, we met my college roommate Katy and her family at the train station in Brussels! They had been visiting Paris and were able to meet us for the day. It was so much fun to see them! We traipsed across most of Brussels (the map was somewhat deceiving...), grabbed some lunch with the kiddos, then went to a park to let the girls play! Paul, Jerome, and Michael went into a airplane/military history museum... Katy and I definitely had more fun enjoying the day outside watching Charlotte & Elodie play. We found some outdoor sitting at a bar and enjoyed a 6-beer sampler, then grabbed waffles before running them to their train. It was an awesome 7 hours with them!!