A City a Day: Brussels, Land of Mussels, Fries, Beer and Waffles (A Guide)

After a long and rainy day in Luxembourg, we boarded the train and made the 3 hour journey to Brussels, Belgium. We stayed at 2Go4 Hostel, about a 10 minute walk from the Brussels Nord train station. We were excited about seeing the sun here (apparently it is a rarity), but the second we walked outside we realized that the wind chill was absolutely insane. We stopped along the way to ask one lady for directions, and she was literally crying from the wind. Anyways, the hostel was pretty nice, and I would recommend it. It is about a 10 minute walk from the main center of Brussels, but they do require an extra €10 deposit that they return to you upon check-out. The decorations here were pretty cool, the lounge there looks like it would be fun to hang out in if you had some extra time. We were also upgraded here from a 6 bed to a 4 bed because we had asked to be placed together, so boo yah! The only problem with this hostel is that it doesn’t serve breakfast. There is complimentary tea and coffee in the morning, but the coffee is instant and the cream is powder… blech.

We asked our hostel for some restaurant reservations and headed off towards the center. The hostel recommended Chez Léon, which has been in business since 1893. It is on rue des Bouchers 18, which is a main restaurant tourist trap avenue. There must’ve been at least 20 other restaurants on this street, all advertising those hokey big yellow signs with giant pictures of mussels and fries. And the waiters are relentless, too… They’re all standing outside trying to convince you to come in, and they really don’t leave you alone. I hate to ignore people, but you have to here. You so much as look at them and they follow you down the street, offering you free drinks and refusing to leave you alone. If you don’t respond or look at them, they start talking to you in 5 different languages, trying to figure out which language they can communicate to you with. Some of them say the darndest things, too…

Chez Léon, Photo Cred: http://www.insidebrussels.be

Anyways, Chez Léon. It was one of the few restaurants on the street that didn’t have all of those cheesy tourist signs, so we figured we’d give it a try. The food was pretty good, although pricy. We didn’t realize until after we had eaten just how huge and touristy the restaurant really is. I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t go back, but I will say I might recommend finding something better for next time (see other restaurant recommendations below).

Anguilles au Vert

My friend decided to try the Anguilles au Vert, or Eels in Green Sauce. During my research, I read that this is a specialty of Brussels and tastes better than it sounds. However, neither of us really liked it… There was the spine still in it, which we weren’t expecting, and it had a strange texture. My friend didn’t like the green sauce, but I did. I have actually tried eel before on sushi and loved it, but this is nothing like that.

Mussels Provençale

I decided to order mussels, because hey… it’s a Brussels classic after all. They had many different variations of Mussels, and instead of going for the normal version, I decided to try something new: Mussels Provençale, basically mussels sauteed in snail butter and topped with a melted layer of parmesan cheese. It was very tasty, I must admit… but my god it was a lot of cheese! You can’t even see the mussels underneath. I, of course, paired it with a fine belgian beer and fries.

Les Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, Photo Cred commons.wikimedia.org

Nearby, you will find the Les Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, a beautiful glass-roofed mall (or arcade). It was built in the mid 1800’s and is famous for being the first mall built in Europe. We only went through one corridor, and it was lined with chocolate stores galore. There were some pretty amazing displays! Definitely worth a visit.

Charles Buls Square

When you exit one of the main halls, you come out onto Charles Buls Square, a very nice area to walk around and often accompanied with live music. If you go to the right, you hit the main square and Grand Palace. If you go to the left, you find the Cathedrale St-Michel et Ste-Gudule.

Cathedrale St-Michel et Ste-Gudule

If you’re sick of seeing cathedrals, just go right towards the main square (or Grote Markt). The cathedral was nice, but it wasn’t spectacular. One interesting thing was how they had statues of saints lining the main hall on the pillars, I had never seen that before.

After that, we headed back towards the main square. It really is a sight to see. In all directions there are beautiful buildings lined in gold. I guess during one part of the year, they also cover the majority of the ground in a beautiful flower carpet like this:

Photo Cred http://www.onlinetravelmagazines.com

If you could visit during that time, it’d definitely be a sight to see! But the square is beautiful regardless, and is known as one of the most beautiful squares in all of Europe.

After staring in awe at the beautiful buildings a while, follow the signs (or your handy map) to get to the famous Mannekin Pis. But don’t expect much… it is literally just a little boy having a wee. I don’t get it. At all. But the best part is that right next door, you will find a famous waffle house… and you just HAVE to buy a waffle there.

Oh, and on the way there, you will see some fun street art:

Adventures of TinTin! On the road from the main square to Mannekin Pis. Photo Cred clausitosfootprints.com

As for Mannekin Pis… behold, the wonder that is a little peeing statue that everyone comes to see:

It’s so very terribly interesting, don’t you think? Sarcasm aside, if you come at special times of year they dress him up. I’ve heard they have a museum dedicated to his outfits… -_-

Here’s what you do: take the mandatory picture in front of the statue, and move on. In fact, turn left onto the same street you came from and go a couple doors down until you find a line coming out of a delectable smelling waffle shop. Take out your wallet and give them your money… it’s worth it!

The famous waffle shop, right next door to Mannkein Pis. Don’t be fooled by that €1 sign, though… We paid about €5-6 for our waffle complete with strawberries, bananas, chocolate, and whipped cream. The €1 must be just for a plain waffle… how boring! Don’t be that person.

Yummers. It is messy as all hell, but get over it. And throw the forks away, there really is no use. Just use your fingers and enjoy!

After you’ve enjoyed that deliciousness, check your map and head towards the palace. It is a bit of a walk, though… Expect about 10-15 minutes, depending on your speed. If you go back to the right of the Mannekin Pis statue and go uphill, you’ll pass by some more street art:

On your way to the palace, you will come across the Jardin du Mont des Arts which houses a statue of Albert I on a horse and some nice landscaping. From the top, you will have a nice view of the gardens and the city laid out below you, especially on a clear day. I’d imagine it’d be quite nice to have a picnic there during the warmer months.

If you continue upwards further, you will find a lovely street with some beautiful architecture and lovely museums. We decided not to go inside any of them, but if you have lots of time and enjoy museums, here is a list of the top ones from my research:

• Musees Royaux d’art et d’Histoire: Parc du Cinquantenaire (no English, need to buy an audioguide!)
• Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts: Rue de la Regence 3

You can really take your pick, though… I saw a museum of cinema, of musical intruments, etc. It’s a museum-goers paradise up here.

The Courthouse and Plaza

Up at the very top of the hill, you will find the courthouse. If you turn left and then make a right on the first street, you will find Coudenberg (the remains of the ancient palace; we decided not to go in, but I’ve heard it is interesting) and then the current palace, Palais de Bruxelles. However, unless you’re in Brussels during the summer months, don’t expect to go inside. It is closed to the public, but you can get your cheesy picture out front:

Royal Palace of Brussels. When you see the flag flying at the top, it means the King is in town.

By this time our feet were extremely tired, so we decided to circle back around towards the central square and grab a drink at the Delirium Bar. If you like beer (and well, you’re crazy if you don’t), you should definitely check it out! They have lots of varieties, and the prices are pretty good. It also has a very fun atmosphere, and seems to be one of the more popular hang outs at night. On the way to the Delirium Bar, you will pass by some other lovely street art:

For a peek inside the bar itself, here you go:

Photo Cred ourtastytravels.com

Photo Cred: Trip Advisor

If anyone reading this has ever been to or knows anything about Brussels, you’ll realize that there’s something very important missing: Atomium. Unfortunately, Atomium is located way outside of the city center, and is a little difficult to get to if you don’t have time and don’t know where you’re going. I had a goal of visiting the Atomium during the day so that we could go up inside of it and see the wonderful views, but that didn’t happen. Instead, we came at night to admire the beautiful lights. There weren’t many other people around, but it was definitely a lovely sight to be seen. I guess there’s also a really nice restaurant at the top, but expect to pay a lot of money and have a reservation!

Atomium during the day. Photo Cred ojoscuriosos.com

If you want to go to Atomium during the day, make sure you have at least a half day to do it. Also, ask your hotel for SPECIFIC directions on how to get there. When I google mapped the directions, it told me it’d only take about 15 minutes. However, when we followed the basic directions of the hostel, it took us about 45 minutes… and the trams only came about once every 20 or 30 minutes.

Atomium at night. Photo Cred Flickr

During the day until 6pm, you can go up inside of this marvellous structure and see some great views, from what I hear. If you’re here for longer, you should definitely check it out!

Below, I will list other museums and restaurants that I didn’t have a chance to see, but which my research found to be worth seeing:

Museums

• Musees Royaux d’art et d’Histoire
• Coudenberg
• Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts

Food and Drink

• Le Cirio: Rue de la Bourse 18 – since 1886, known for their decently priced wines, sparkling and still
• Poechenellekelder: Rue du Chêne, 5 – great beer and wine, right near the Mannekin Pis
• Bia Mara: Rue du Marché aux Poulets 41 – the best fish and chips!
• Tonton Garby: Rye Duquesnoy 6 – great, cheap sandwiches!
• Le Wine Bar du Sablon des Marolles: Rue Haute 198
• Le Temps Danse: Rue aux Choux 3

Think I missed something? Please feel free to let me know in the comments! 🙂

Late Night Seafood Deliciousness

Last Friday, the host mom and I spent a few hours grocery shopping for our Mexican Fiesta the following night. As a result, we didn’t get home until past 11pm and the poor girls were starving. Her idea of a quick meal shocked (and greatly excited) me: seafood upon delicious seafood! So this post is basically just me bragging about how awesome my host mother’s cooking is.

She cooked up some almejas (clams), berberechos (cockles), mejillones (mussels) and something I had never heard of before… navajas (razor clams?). Now, I’m pretty familiar with my seafood… in fact, I am addicted to it. So it is kind of surprising that I had never heard about it before, let alone seen it. Maybe it just isn’t found in the US? No matter… it was really tasty, and I highly recommend trying it if you like other such things. The only strange part was that each one had a little sac of what appeared to be black eggs, which didn’t quite suit my appetite, so I just picked it off.

It was beyond amazing, I could eat plates and plates of it! In fact, the little 4 year old in the family did. It was insane, she ate it all like it was candy! I don’t know a single other child that would eat seafood, let alone mussels and the like. In fact, even as much as I love seafood, I didn’t even try mussels or clams until I was in my late teens. I was impressed! 

Anyways, it was delicious… and I just had to brag 😉 Until next time!

Madrid: Crowds, Palacio Real, y El Prado

After Barcelona, my mother and I ventured over to Madrid, Spain’s capital. I was super excited to go because I knew everyone there spoke Spanish (vs. Catalan in Barcelona), so I’d be hearing it everywhere and also have the opportunity to speak it. I mapped out the city and planned out 3 full days of adventure, starting with the famous Puerta del Sol on the first morning. Unfortunately, there was such an amazing crowd of people that I didn’t really get any pictures of it… We exited out of the metro and were immediately pushed into a hoarde of people, we couldn’t even pull our cameras out. Not that we wanted to, we just kind of wanted to get out of there as soon as we could.

This is a picture of new year’s at Puerta del Sol… but I’m telling you, it was something like this even a few days before. Photo Cred http://www.thenewsignificance.com

To be fair, it was in the days leading up to New Year’s, so that may be why there were so many people… but it wasn’t pleasant, so we headed on to the next thing. People had told us to visit the beautiful Plaza Mayor, and that there were some great cafes to check out there and people watch. When we arrived, we saw booths set up all over the square, half of them open and selling weird creepy hats and cheap toys and the other half of them closed. No one was buying, it was just a couple of vendors standing around having a smoke. It was unfortunate because it pretty much blocked our entire view of the square, plus one half of the building surrounding the square was covered in construction tarp. So we didn’t get any pictures there either… 😦 although this is what it should’ve looked like:

Photo Cred: http://www.disfrutamadrid.com

From there, we headed to our next destination: Mercado de San Miguel. Finally, a successful visit! The place was buzzing with people, and everywhere you looked there were loads of different food and drink options. There was a stall dedicated solely to olives, for instance. Black olives, green olives, green olives stuffed with sardines and wrapped in pepers, olive skewers with onion and sundried tomato, etc… you get the picture. Another stall that sold seafood had all of their items placed on plastic plates, all stacked up on one another 15 plates high, ready to pass out. And, of course, there is as much sangria as your heart desires. Of course, this is a tourist attraction… so everything is a bit more expensive. It definitely isn’t a place you go for a meal, but rather somewhere you go for a snack or a drink and take a look around to enjoy the ambiance.

Photo Cred bilybilybaby.com

Do you see the sea urchins? They have everything!

See the weird gray and white things on the right and left? We figured out later that that was actually a weird fish protein that is apparently very popular here =X It didn’t taste bad, it was just… strange.

After the market, we headed towards the Royal Palace. We made a quick detour once there because we heard some chanting a couple streets over. There was a demonstration going on, and unfortunately I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying besides “Libertad!,” or “Freedom!” Freedom from what? I couldn’t tell you. But it was a small group, maybe about 15 demonstrators, and then a big group of police surrounding them. We stood there for about 10 minutes watching, and during that time at least 10 other officers showed up and started passing out riot gear. At one point, an officer started yelling at one of the boys and the tension was so high I swore something big was about to happen. We decided to leave soon after…

I asked the mother in my host family if she happened to know anything about it, and she said in Madrid, there’s a protest going on every day. Who knows?

Then we finally made it to the Plaza de Oriente in front of the Royal Palace. Unfortunately, it being winter and all, I am sure the Plaza wasn’t nearly as beautiful as it will be in a couple months with all of the springtime flowers… but it was still a nice plaza, with some street performers and vendors.
We wrapped our way around the building and finally found the entrance to the Palace itself… but quickly realized we made a big mistake by not buying our tickets online. We had to wait about an hour in line te get in, versus people who had bought their tickets online got to go to the front of the line. Stupid. Don’t make our mistake! I could kick myself, it was such a big waste of time.

But anyways… the Palacio Real de Madrid is the official living quarters of the royal family, but they really only use it for ceremonies. The place is absolutely gigantic… it took as at least two hours to get through it, and towards the end we were really just rushing it because we wanted to get on to the next thing. This palace was beyond beautiful. There were too many things to count covered in gold, velvet on the walls and floors, amazing sculptures and paintings… it was mind-blowing to see so much wealth in one place. Especially in a country so hurt by the economic crisis. Hmm…

They don’t let you take pictures inside once you are past a certain point, but here’s an idea of one of the rooms (I randomly found online):

This building is just straight across from the Royal Palace, but you can’t go in… I couldn’t figure out what it was but I thought it was a beautiful building itself!

The next day, we went to the CaixaForum because I had heard about it’s vertical garden. Artist Patrick Blanc designed this, and it contains over 250 species of plants with absolutely no soil. It was pretty cool! But again, I am sure it is even cooler in the Spring. We also went into the CaixaForum since it was cheap and saw the Roni Horn exhibit along with an Ancient Roman/Greek exhibition. It is probably a good idea to look into the exhibitions before going to see if it is anything you’d be interested in. When I first walked into the Roni Horn exhibit, I was extremely confused… it was all about how this woman’s face changed depending on what water she was in (I didn’t see it). But there was also many other works there that I found very interesting.

Roni Horn floor art. I found the quotes very interesting.

One of the things people told me before going to Madrid was that we NEEDED to try a Calamari Sandwich (or bocadillo de calamares). My mother and I were skeptical… I mean, we LOVE seafood of all kinds, but a calamari SANDWICH? It just seems like a waste of good seafood to have it masked by a bunch of bread. But, we decided to try it anyways. When in Madrid…

I’m so happy we stopped for one! It was absolutely delicious. Just the right amount of spices, perfectly delicious, and somehow the bread just worked. We got it from a place called El Brillante de Atocha which I had heard served the best bocadillo in Madrid. I highly recommend it!

Photo Cred http://www.planetware.com

After that, we went to the world famous Prado Museum. Again, we made the same mistake of not buying our tickets online >.< Anyways, the museum is beautiful, inside and out. However, it is extremely hard to see it all. It’s important to look into which areas in the museum interest you, and then only go to those rooms. The museum is way too huge to go through in one day, and I am super happy we didn’t bother with the audio guides because hell… ain’t nobody got time for that. I can only see myself taking advantage of the audio guide if we only went to one or two of the rooms and wanted to know about the era and paintings in detail. What my mother and I ended up doing was going slowly through the first couple rooms (which took over an hour), realizing how much more there was to see, and then kind of quick-walking through the rest of the museum, not wanting to miss anything important. By the end, my head hurt… way too much art in such a short period!

Beautiful building at the famous Plaza Cibeles (Starbucks life)

Thank God there’s so many flags, I wouldn’t have known what country I was in.

Then we walked around the Gran Via and saw the famous Metropolis building. From what I understand, it isn’t really famous for anything specific except just looking pretty and being along one of the biggest Gran Vias in Spain. But hell, I thought it looked pretty too… and it is definitely nice to walk around that area at night, even though it is a bit touristy. I highly recommend a restaurant just a block past the Metropolis on the called GranVia Uno. We went there twice on our short trip to Madrid, and the food was delicious and they had decently cheap wine. The interior of this restaurant is beautiful!
 Also, right across the street from the Metropolis is a building called the Círculo de Bellas Artes, which has many exhibitions but also, most notably, a nice patio area on the very top that has gorgeous views of Madrid (I believe it costs about €4 to go up). Unfortunately we went up on a quite cold and windy day, but when the spring and summer comes along it would be a fantastic place to have a drink and enjoy the beautiful views. We went at night, but I am sure it’d be gorgeous during the day as well! Probably even better photo opportunities.

Our last day, we explored the Parque del Retiro which is a huge (I cannot stress just how huge) park right next to the Prado museum. It was very nice for a stroll, but again I wished we were there in spring. Towards the north part of the park is a huge man-made lake where you can take out a row-boat, and along the paths there are many street vendors selling purses and sunglasses. It’s too bad they don’t have parks like that where I come from!

If you exit the park at the north end, you’ll end up at the Puerta de Alcalá, which is a famous archway that once served as the entry point to the city. Honestly, it is good to see… but not really worth going out of your way for unless you’re a history/architecture buff.

Overall, we enjoyed our stay in Madrid and we are glad we went, but I personally prefer Barcelona. Yes, I liked being able to speak Spanish for once and be spoken to in Spanish, but I felt like a lot of the waiters and workers were rather rude. For instance, more than once I would approach someone in Spanish to ask a simple question and they’d cut me off: “Just say it in English.” Rude. I figured these people are probably jaded by all of the tourists that flood this city, but it was very frustrating for me nonetheless. The sights were also very nice, but there was just something I preferred about the vibes in Barcelona and the people. Would I go back? Sure, maybe. But I’m not dying to.