Beglium - Land of Waffles and Frites

After much nagging, I've finally written about our travels to Belgium. The first weekend in may was the first Bank Holiday, a glorious tradition that means everyone will be traveling and often enjoying three of the rainiest days of the year (Murphy's law strikes again). Luckily, this long weekend was the exception to the rule and we had brilliant weather on our 3 day adventure across Belgium.

We took the Eurostar across to the continent and spent 2 days and nights in Bruges, then a final day in Brussels before coming back across the water. I had a previously traveled to Bruges, which was a lot of fun, despite being much colder. Laura has now determined that I should be doing recon missions prior to all of our trips so I know where everything is and what to do when we get there.

As it turns out, there are three major activities to do in Bruges:

• Drink delicious Belgian beer
  
• Eat the greatest street food in Europe - Waffles and Fries with mayo
• Look at the medieval buildings all lit up at night

I can say with certainty, we accomplished each one of those activites with gusto. We did revisit my two favourite bars, 't Bruges Beertje and Cambrinus, each with hundreds of beers on their lists. Laura's pick of the weekend was a banana beer that was quite good.


In addition to copious drinking, we also indulged in the fantastic street food of waffles drenched in chocolate and frites (fries) covered in mayonaise.

Bruges has some fantastic canals (like a mini-Venice), so we took a canal tour on Sunday.


We also climed up the 366 steps to the top of the tower. Not a bad view from up there... but definitely not as good as it had been hyped. The fenced in view really put a damper on how beautiful a sight it could have been.


Our final day in Belgium, we woke up and took the train back into Brussels and planned on the whole day there. In hindsight, this was WAY too much time. Brussels has one main square, a cathedral or two, and some shopping streets, but otherwise is entirely skippable. Probably one of my least favourite cities. Part of that could be that we were pretty tired from two days of walking around Bruges, and just wanted to relax instead of sightsee. The other part could be that we didn't have a full guidebook for the city, just the few pages in our huge Europe guidebook.


Either way, I can't recommend Bruges highly enough. Make Brussels a very quick day-trip, but keep your sights on Bruges for any Belgian-based plans you have.

Here are some pictures from Bruges, as well as pictures from Brussels. Enjoy.