Thumbs up for Brussels

Our last full day in the city was the only one that we had real sightseeing plans and they mainly involved a walking tour of the city at 2:30. Until then, we just walked around and had coffee and waffles. We had actually managed to see most of the main sights around Brussels by ourselves already but really wanted to take the tour to learn the history of what we had been admiring from afar for the past few days. Before the tour we bought more chocolate (shock!) and actually found a new part of town that we hadn't walked in yet. It seemed like a more affluent area with lots of high end artifact stores (the city seemed overly found of African carvings, Asian bowls and any stuffed game animal) chocolatiers and flower shops. We walked though an antique market that was full of all the aforementioned interesting collectors items plus china dishes, clocks, a horse skeleton, two replicas of "David", a zebra skin, and chandeliers galore. 

The walking tour came around and of course, it started raining harder than it had all day. The next four hours (four hours! It was such a long time.) we're spent listening to n interesting man talk about Brussels and how it became a country, beer, chocolate, French fries, wars, and lots of important guys named Leopold. At 6:30, we were exhausted, thoroughly damp and chilled to the bone, so we ran into the first restaurant we saw with two girls we met on the tour for a traditional Belgian meal and Belgian beer. The meal was meatballs with apple syrup sauce and the beer was something I can't pronounce but very tasty (not as good as German beer though. German beer will be hard to top I think). Katlin had a beer called Kriek, a cherry beer that is a class all it's own for good reason, since it tasted like a bit of cherry heaven. After dinner, waffles followed (of course) and we eventually said goodbye to our new friends, although they are both going to be in Amsterdam when we are going to be, so we hope to meet up with them again. Brussels may not have made it quite to the top of the list as a city with Prague, Florence and Barcelona but it definitely has some parts that have made it to my "best of" list, like best food that wasn't a real meal (chocolate, waffles, French fries) and best city square (the grand place, where the flower carpet happens every few years, is a open square surrounded by gilded buildings and grand halls, coffee and waffle shops, museums and city buildings). Brussels certainly gets a thumbs up (mostly a sincere thumbs up, but sometimes, like when we finally found the little peeing man, it was a sarcastic thumbs up) from me!