Six Foot Four and Full of Muscles...

Well some people think I’m 6’5” but for the moment let’s not worry about that, instead we’ll talk about Brussels.
With another free weekend upon us, we decided it was time to mix up our travels a bit... so we left the mother land for continental Europe using our old ferry friend. The one change we did make was to fill the car with girls, and leave out any boys for me to play with... moving forward I think you’ll find this is the last time this will happen. We consisted of Kylie’s school friend Morgan whom you would have read about in such blogs as Luxembourg, our flatmate (and friend) Jess a.k.a “Jerry Collins” and her Aussie friend Kayla (worst accent in history).

After arriving to our hostel at around midnight we headed straight to bed to make the most of Saturday. For a change we didn’t have breakfast included so we headed out in search of some of Belgium’s finest. Our Hostel was perfectly centrally located so it was just a quick walk to Grand Markt Place. This is one of the nicer market squares we have seen, with tonnes of nice old buildings and places that were probably historically significant, but more importantly we found a great cafe/restaurant. The girls all went for waffles ‘when in Belgium’ I suppose, but I went for the international which was bacon, eggs, fruit salad, baguette, orange juice and a coffee... that’s how I roll I suppose. After breakfast we were greeted by my friend Niels who caught the train down from Amsterdam, adding much needed balance to the group.

Full of goodness we headed out to soak up the sights and soak up the sun, did I mention it was a balmy 24 degrees... pretty sure I did... anyway so making the most of the sun we headed into a pub, and not just any pub, it was called Delirium and had a world record 2004 different types of beer! Naturally we tried quite a few; the girls went for exotic flavours such as mango, cherry and coconut where Niels and I went for the more classic styles. We were tempted to go for something more familiar such as Macs Gold or Steinlager, but when the bar tender described the fruity beer to Kylie as ‘like drowning in sugar syrup whilst having sex with Willy Wonker’ she just couldn’t say no.

Even though I would have been quite happy to try as many of the beers as humanly possible, the girlies decided we needed to get in some more sights. As many of you may know Brussels has a famous statue of a boy pissing, but many of you may not know there is also a statue of a girl pissing. So we quickly saw both of these sights and then followed Niels’ lead around the city as he has been there quite a few times. He took us away from the tourists to the local fish market where we had some wine and Kylie ordered herself some battered fish, which to her dismay ended up being small whole fish – justice. We saw a few more pretty things and then met up with another of Kylie’s friends Natalie and her boyfriend James, who were randomly there for the weekend too. All the walking and sun really took it out of us so we went to another bar, ‘when in Belgium’ I suppose. After a few more beers we went home for a quick siesta to rejuvenate before dinner.

For dinner we headed into a seafood alley where we bartered for a 3 course meal and some drinks... we all eagerly anticipated the delicious mussels and paella but were highly disappointed at what came. We picked and pushed our food around and after barely making a dent we decided to complain... well actually we delegated it to James who did us proud. We paid a little money and headed straight back to the pub for a few more beers before retiring for the night.

The next day we repeated our breakfast before driving to another local attraction called ‘The Atomium’. It is a giant atom that has different things in each ball, well at 19 Euro we never found out, but it looked very impressive all the same. As we headed out of Brussels we went to Waterloo, the sight of some famous war with some little French dude, not much to see so we left quickly.
We then stopped in at Ghent, which was a beautiful gothic city. We walked the cobbled streets, looked at the old buildings and ate the frites (it’s what they call fries). It was surprisingly a very nice place.

We then headed back to our ferry, arrived back in England and finished another great weekend... sorry about the abrupt finish but I think I covered the main details.
Always a pleasure, Dublin next weekend.