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belgium

Brussels to Munich

Aug 11, 2010
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Picture from this day can be found here.

We got up early the next day and checked out of our hotel, and headed out on foot for the Brussels train station. There we caught an Inter-City Express (ICE) train for Cologne, and then on to Frankfurt. We changed trains at Franfurt, and then continued the journey on to Munich. The train ride was very comfortable – the ICE trains are very modern, and we had first class seats so there was food service, so we had hot coffee and hot chocolate at our seats while we traveled.

They had a restaurant car as well, but we had prepared for the trip by shopping for food at Carrefour Express, so we set up a little picnic at our seats. We did much the same thing the last time we were in Europe – it is a good way to save money and also enjoy some local foods. This time we had a big block of stinky cheese, roasted turkey, and crackers to enjoy. We weren’t prepared with a knife, though, so we used a wine opener that we brought with us to slice pieces of cheese onto crackers. Yum.

A guy down the way had completely passed out while taking the train, and at the time we thought it was the loudest that we had heard anyone snore. But that was before our flight home two weeks later. He stayed on for most of the journey, and I think he would have been embarrassed to hear how loud he was snoring.

Finally, after about four hours we pulled into Munich station, and from there it was an easy walk across the street to our hotel (NH Hotel Deutsch Kaiser Munich). The hotel’s close proximity to the station had me worried while planning that perhaps it would be noisy, but our room was on the eighth floor, and absolutely silent – so silent I had to strain to hear any noise at all. The room was very nice as well, maybe the best hotel room of the trip.

After dropping off our gear we set out to explore the old town part of Munich, and I’ll admit that I was at first a little disappointed that there were so many people and so many shops. It felt like walking through an American shopping mall. Towards the end of the street in Marienplatz things got a little better, however. More cathedrals, more historical buildings, and more people. We shared a little table in front of a streetside restaurant with some German people and ordered some beers from the menu, and after a little practice, Kuniko ordered some white sausages in German. The couple cheered his efforts speaking in German, and it was pretty impressive. She is really good at picking up languages, and she really did well with the pronunciation. The sausages were great, although we ate them with the skin on, which I found out later is a faux pas. Locals apparently eat them by skinning them first. Oh well… they were still delicious.

After beer we walked around some more and took in lots of sights. It really is a beautiful city once you get away from the touristy areas. Dinner was at a traditional German restaurant that Kuniko’s guidebook recommended. It was a little bit of an early dinner, actually. The dinner was pretty traditional as well – sausages, pretzels, sauerkraut, beer, beef and pork. Not light at all. Very delicious, but we retired to our hotel completely full.

Brussels

Aug 10, 2010
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Pictures from this day can be found here.

Today we slept in a little bit, and then headed downstairs to try out the (included) hotel breakfast. This breakfast was better attended by the guests of the hotel, and they had a much bigger selection of foods. We ate a pretty big breakfast, and then set out to explore the city.

First stop was across town to see the Grand Palace, situated in old town. The route to get there was a little tricky, mainly because we didn’t spend much time looking at maps, and also because the design of the city hides the Grand Palace until the last minute, creating a dramatic discovery. It was quite effective, too. We spent some time kicking around the palace taking pictures and watching the preparations for some kind of festival in the square, and then went south looking for Mannekin Pis. Mannekin Pis is kind of the symbol of Brussels (or so the guidebook said) – the little boy peeing into the fountain. It certainly is a frequently seen symbol around Japan, and so we thought we ought to check it out. When we finally saw it, well, it was smaller than we expected. But I’ll bet he hears that a lot. For such a popular landmark we were one of only about four people that turned out to see it at that hour. Just early-risers, I guess.

The weather continued to cooperate with our travel plans, and we had clear skies while we explored Old Town and the surrounding areas. St. Michel Cathedral was especially impressive, as well as the European Union’s new headquarters. After a couple hours of sightseeing we were getting tired and ready to take a break, so we followed a guidebook suggestion and found a restaurant/brasserie called Le Atomme near our hotel. The place was well decorated, it had young, friendly staff that spoke English (and even translated the menu for us) and a wide(!) selection of Belgian beers. We tried a couple of new ones with lunch – Kuniko had a rabbit stew, and I had a beef one. Both were excellent, but the Kuniko’s soup was really good – definitely a taste that I’ve never experienced before.

Back on the sightseeing trail we used the free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s to check some messages and organize a plan to meet my aunt Nancy’s friend Roger in Zurich, as well as have a Belgian waffle for dessert. We even made a stop at one of the many chocolate shops in town to have some intense chocolate truffles. We also hit one of the Carrefour Express convenience stores to stock up on supplies for the next day’s long train trip to Munich. Carrefour Express was great – lots of interesting stuff, and as usual, the wine, cheese and dried meats were ridiculously cheap. Why can’t somebody in Japan do something like this?

All this walking around, drinking and eating was pretty tiring, so next stop was a long nap in our hotel room, with the window wide open to hear the sounds of the city. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me – the view from our room was great, and the breeze blowing in the strange sounds and smells made for a very relaxing nap.

We got organized and headed out once again to Mannekin Pis, because someone I know had recommended a bar across the street with a good beer list, and I was looking forward to trying more Belgian beers. We found Mannekin Pis completely swamped by tourists this time, and we settled into a bar across the street to watch the mayhem and sip our beers. It was a little tricky ordering beer because I was just shooting in the dark. The bartender wasn’t too helpful – I sensed that he was teasing me a little with a regular sitting at the bar. Still, I would probably do the same if the roles are reversed, and it is enjoyable to make fun of tourists. I used to do that a lot in California.

For dinner we found a place called Taverne du Passage, which was in a touristy area but had friendly enough staff and a traditional Belgian food menu. Not knowing much about Belgian food we wanted to at least try something local, but as we discovered Belgian food draws a heavy influence from France. Not that it is a bad thing, but we wanted to try something uniquely Belgian. The answer was what Kuniko ordered – waterzooi. A cream-based chicken stew, it was a little light on flavor, but it made up for it in volume. Not bad. I was craving eggs for some reason, so had a ham omelet that was simple, salty, but quite good. We dodged some raindrops on the way back to our hotel, but managed to avoid some heavier rain that began after we got back.

Koblenz to Brussels

Aug 09, 2010
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Pictures from this day can be found here.

Waking up was a little tough after such a long start to our trip, but we weren’t on any tight schedules so we could sleep in a bit and enjoy the comfortable beds. We had breakfast at the hotel because it was included in the price, and they put on quite a feast. There weren’t many people staying at the hotel to enjoy it, but Kuniko and I certainly did. Again the breads were great, and they also had lots of variation of yogurt and cereal. Sometimes they were combined already, so it was a bit of an adventure to try some new things.

We checked out of the hotel and then went on foot to the station. On the way we found a couple of supermarkets, and so we stopped to buy some shampoo and conditioner (because you can never be sure if hotels will have them) as well as some other supplies. The supermarket was much different from Japanese ones – about 60% meat, 30% cheese, and 10% everything else. I bought some ibuprofen on my own using an app that I downloaded for my iphone that led me to a pharmacy, and another app that told me how to say “Can I buy something for a headache?” in German. The iphone was very useful on the trip, but there were some drawbacks. I turned off data roaming and 3G to avoid big charges to my account, so that effectively turned off my GPS – I couldn’t really use the GPS to navigate unless I happened to be near a Wi-Fi spot. Luckily there were plenty of wi-fi spots around, it is just a pain to take time out of your vacation to go look for one. So the iphone was a mixed success.

We caught a train to Brussels that passed through Luxembourg. The scenery on the way was very nice, mainly following the river. Once we arrived in Luxembourg we passed a huge building on a hillside, overlooking some other smaller places down below in a river valley – we went by so fast we had no time to take a picture but it was one of the more dramatic things we saw during the trip and we had no time to really go and check it out. More research is necessary to figure out what it was.

We had about an hour to kill transferring in Luxembourg, so we went out into the town to get some sandwiches and drinks to take on the next leg of the train trip. Big surprise that shouldn’t have been – everybody there spoke French. I was just getting used to speaking German and now it was all French. That caught us off-guard, but all in all my French is probably better than my German, and both of them are extremely limited anyway. There was always English to fall back on, and I admit that we did that quite a bit this trip.

On to Brussels, and we arrived after another couple of hours on the train. I spent the time dozing off, watching the scenery, writing in my journal, and enjoying not having to do much of anything. It was a good way to travel.

My first impressions of Brussels – very old, but liberal. The city was fun to walk around in, and the people around us seemed to be slightly more eccentric than what we found in Koblenz. I liked the feel of the city, but it was very crowded and there were a lot of cars like any big city, and that kind of detracted from the old feeling I got.

From Brussels station we walked across town to find our hotel (NH Hotel Brussels City Center), after a few wrong turns. It was in a good location, and also very clean. The staff were a little flaky, though, and they couldn’t figure out how to process my credit card correctly. Turned out that the machine was out of paper… huh. We unloaded our stuff and went to look for something easy to eat close by. Ended up on a touristy street eating at a restaurant called Montenegro. Eastern European food that was nothing special, but the beer was good and the atmosphere of eating on the street was fun. Some street entertainers walked by now and then and included transvestite magicians and a sax player. How’s that for liberal?

We headed back to our room and enjoyed one of the bottles of wine from Rudelsheim, and then crashed out. Another day, another two countries.