Ramblings en Voyage: birthday in Brussels, le 5 avril 2019
Last Friday morning, I woke up with plenty of time to spare before my bus to Brussels. I got up at 8 am, and noted to myself to leave for the bus station within 45 minutes. I went to the kitchen and ate the last of my charcoal baguette with some garlic cheese spread (mmmm) and a capuccino.
As I ate, I checked Google maps, and nearly choked when I saw that the travel time to the station has now 38 minutes, instead of 28 like it'd been when I'd checked the night before. My first lesson at age 20: the traffic on Friday mornings is very different from that of Thursday night.
So I hurriedly put the plates away, and washed them as best I could. As I put my mug away in the cabinet, I accidentally knocked a glass down in the cabinet, causing a shower of glass to rain down around me. So I spent another. fifteen minutes picking up pieces of glass, and dusting up the leftover pieces.
Flash forward to me anxiously sitting on the metro, watching the metro stops go by and furiously wishing that they would go by faster. My friend texted me multiple times, telling me to come as quickly as possible, and I cheerfully responded each time that I was almost there, knowing that it wasn't true at all. Perhaps this will be the year that I learn that leaving on time, and even a little early, isn't a bad idea.
After a quick and stressful sprint to the bus pickup area (a quick and easy way to pick yourself up before your day starts!) I was on the bus. Sweating slightly and heart still pounding, but happily on my way to Brussels.
Skip forward to arrival and the immediate search for gauffres — waffles! It's hard to tell what things are truly local favorites, and what are actually things that would have died out naturally had tourists not caught onto them. In any case, I'm not a huge fan of waffles, and even as the waffles in Brussels were pretty good, they were good in a way that all things are good to me if they are composed completely of sugar. I feel almost as though I've soiled the beautiful experience of Belgian waffles! Let me salvage this with a picture:
The last thing I want is to rain on anyone's parade: they are certainly worth a try! Perhaps I'm just hesitant to enjoy anything I've been told repeatedly that I should enjoy.
My friend and I took our waffles to enjoy in the Grand Place in Brussels, where pretty much every single tourist in the city is all the time, and for good reason. We sat and watched people: groups of tourists, crowded around guides who were always easily identifiable by something they would hold that would aid them in standing out from the crowd: a sign, a balloon, at one point I think I saw a felt flower? Effective.
If you stand in the center of the Grand Place, you will see on all four sides of you architecture so beautiful that it squeezes you inside. All the buildings are so stunning, and even more surprising to me was that they were so casually all in one place. I thought about New York, where I lived last summer, and how there would be a building here or there that would take my breath away — but in different places in the city. But in Brussels, in the Grand Place, there were all these indescribably beautiful buildings all placed together, as if to say, yeah we didn't even have to space these out. We've got plenty of beautiful buildings to spare.
My friend and I then decided that we needed to return to our Air BnB, which was in a small Belgian suburb called Uccle. And here I come to my biggest piece of advice to travelers, anywhere you go, but especially for those venturing into a foreign country: it's worth it to spend that much more on wherever you are living to stay closer to the areas that you want to visit. Public transportation, while generally available everywhere, may not be as easy as you had expected.
(Especially if you are a rather spoiled city girl who has only enjoyed systems such as the New York and the Paris metro system, both of which run easily enough that you haven't had to worry about how to get around when there aren't readily available places to purchase your tickets, or indeed where to go when different directions aren't clearly marked.)
We embarked on a cute little tram that would take us nearly an hour, instead of the promised twenty minutes, to get to our Air BnB. But nothing to be too upset about because the tram is much better than the metro anyways: a wonderful way to see a little bit of the city and then the surrounding towns, and certainly more pleasant than the metro.
And now for a bizarre interaction on the tram to our Air BnB: my friend and I were standing by one of the tram's entrances, when one of two men sitting down with his friend started to stand up and offer me his seat. Thinking that he was getting off for his stop, I took the seat happily beside his friend, who then proceeded to offer me a chocolate cookie. I asked him if he spoke French, thinking it a good opportunity to practice speaking — Parlez-vouz Français? — to which he responded, I don't speak. Then I said, English? And he shook his head at that too. So there we go: a truly bizarre experience that resulted in a very delicious cookie.
Finally, we arrived at our Air BnB, and it was very nice. The little suburb was extremely green, flush with vegetation all along the little streets to get to the house, which I love. The roads were all cobblestone, which gave my unnecessarily fragile ankles a hard time, but were otherwise charming.
Fast forward to our attempt to exit our lovely Air BnB and head to the Cinquantenaire park. We immediately started to encounter some problems. To begin, the little town of Uccle is not in Brussels, which meant that we had to travel for the better half of an hour just to get back into the center of the city. We began with the train station that would take us close to the park, but the instructions for how to buy a ticket and also where exactly this train was going were faded, and (a greater obstacle) written in Flemish. Undaunted, we slowly figured it out, and after wandering up and down the rail looking for somewhere we could actually buy the tickets, we finally found a ticket machine, which had an unfortunate mosquito trapped inside the glass. But when we tried to purchase tickets, this machine declined both our credit cards and our coins.
So we were stuck there, trying to figure out this machine, calling our parents to try to figure out why our cards weren't working, for nearly two hours. We finally resolved to jump onto the next train and simply ask the conductor if it would be possible to purchase tickets on board. We tried that, hopping into the front of the train, only to see that there was no way to access the conductor. We looked at each other, as the warning sounded to let us know that the doors were about to close, and my friend, as paranoid as I, was thinking the same thing I was: We can't go to Belgian prison! And so we leaped, I mean truly leaped off that train, just seconds before the doors slammed shut behind us.
That got us feeling more animated than when we had been stuck wandering aimlessly around the train station, and we were laughing when we finally resolved to walk to a different station and head back to the Grand Place instead of trying for the park. That, we agreed, could wait for the next day.
The walk back to the other station was lovely, pictaresque. I passed many houses that I imagined myself occupying one day: just living in this little place, and then making the trek into the city whenever I wanted to enjoy a night out or a wander a busier street. Some of these very average and probably completely unremarkable streets in this Belgian town were so beautiful that I thought they should have been on postcards.
After arriving at the station, we purchased our tickets (which, ironically, were not even scanned or checked on the tram) and headed back onto the center of the city. And then we had a walk that truly salvaged our entire day, even making up for those two hours lost on fruitlessly trying to understand public transportation.
We walked down beautiful streets, heading towards Chez Léon, Brussel's finest moules-frites (mussels and fries) institution. On the way, we passed these beautiful monuments, that when we looked up on Google maps, weren't even large, touristy attractions. Again, it's as if the city was saying to us, every part of me is stunning. Even les inconnus — the unknown — are beautiful.
When we got close to Chez Léon, we realized that we had discovered a treasure trove of restaurants, friteries, waffle houses, and, of course, bars. We wandered slowly through the many roads packed with people, drinking beer and laughing, and the restaurant hosts standing outside, genially shouting at us to come on inside, try their specialties. There was so much excitement in those streets — just writing about them makes me want to go back.
Something distinctly different from Paris that shoudln't have surprised me too much being that we were in Brussels: instead of people sitting outside of cafés with their espresso and a cigarette at all hours of the day and night, it was people sitting with or without others, drinking beer.
When we finally got to Chez Léon, we sadly realized that we weren't the only ones who had been told that it was the best mussels and fries restaurant in Brussles: there were at least forty people waiting outside, so we knew we shouldn't even bother. We went instead to an equally lively but less chaotic place called Affligen, which had caught my eye on the way because I'm a sucker for red velvet seats and candlelit tables.
There, we spoke some slightly stilted French with an extremely friendly waiter. The stereotype that foreigners consider all of the America to be the same thing as New York has not yet been disproved for me. This waiter's immediate reaction upon hearing that we were from America was to vehemently declare, Oh j'aime vraiment New York! (I really love New York!)
And then, we ordered the long-awaited moules-frites.And that lived up to the hype. My mussels were cooked in a white wine sauce, and my friend's in the classic marinarde. They came along with fries, of course. Side note: in Europe, they have their fries with mayonnaise, which I found truly disturbing at first before realizing something. The mayo here is AMAZING.
After our late and lovely dinner, my friend and I met some other kids from our program at a nearby bar called Delirium. This place boasted of 200+ beers on tap, and when we entered, we knew they weren't kidding: three different floors, each with their own bars and their own type of beers. We found our way to the second floor (with the darks, ambers, blondes, and IPAs, as if I know what any of that means) where we found three other friends and talked to them about our day. Remembering that it was my birthday, one of the girls offered to buy me a drink! We headed up to the third floor, where she bought not one, but two cherry ales to celebrate. And to meet the 5 euro minimum charge for credit cards.
We passed about an hour just chatting and laughing with our friends, before splitting up to head back to our respective Air Bnbs. Thankfully, we had an uneventful journey home.
For my first birthday away from home, and I mean truly away from home because last year I'd really started to feel like my college was a home in its own way, it was not so bad. I feel as though this little entry has been more food and imagery than it has been words. And truly, that's what the whole weekend felt like to me. An experience in sight and taste, instead of in thought. Which was fine, because I didn't by any means feel passive. My eyes were constantly probing, wondering about the different buildings and marveling at the ever-present greenery, and of course my tastebuds were stimulated as I continuously sought on delicious Belgian bites. After last weekend, I am just excited about my next excursion.
For more of my random ramblings in this beautiful city (and others now!), read my other Ramblings en Voyage! Fondly with love, bread, and love of bread — Juliann.
