Brussels or Part 1/4 of the Spring Break Saga

Now begins part 1 of 4 of the spring break saga, also known as the glorious two weeks of traveling Europe. It's going to take a little while for me to go through the entire break because A) It's a 4 part series B) With the weather as nice as its been, I'm unmotivated to sit inside and write C) I'm going to Portugal on Thursday and will need to write about that as well.

Our trip begin, as all trips out of Salamanca do, with a bus ride to the Madrid airport, where we caught a flight to Charleroi Airport in Belgium. From there it was an hour shuttle ride to the Brussels main train station where we had to take the metro to our hostel.

ASIDE: Public transportation would be a comical motif of the entire trip as we discovered most cities do not have compulsory system for using the metro.

We bought tickets for the metro but found that there was nowhere that required you hand them in. Unlike New York City, you can just walk right up to the track without passing through any sort of turnstile machine. After that first time, we didn't buy a ticket for any public transport system until Prague, the last stop on our trip.

When we exited the subway, my first impression of Brussels was, "This looks surprisingly like Atlanta." Very modern buildings, wide highways, and lots of cars. Until I saw the above-ground tram darting though the streets, Brussels at night was indistinguishable from any modern city in the U.S.

We found our hostel, this would be my first hostel experience, and discovered instead of a typical room to share we had rented a full apartment with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and an upstairs loft where Brandon and I slept. There was plenty of room for the six of us.

A view of the city, before the Magritte museum

Our travel fatigue was soon overcome by the excitement of being in a new city for the "official" start of our vacation. Our hostel, we didn't realize until later, was a 15 minute walk from the center of the city but since it was late, we settled for the first restaurant we came upon and ate a late but delicious meal in an old square near where we were staying. I ate spaghetti Bolognese (since the menu was in French, it was the only thing I could understand.)

The next day we woke up early and after consulting a map, still managed to walk 45 minutes in the wrong direction, through Brussels' little Turkey before we found the right direction. The center of the city was small and bustling with quaint shops, crowded outdoor bars, and a plethora of French fries and chocolate fountains.

The group enjoying some french fries

We walked through the beautiful plaza in the center of the city took a self-guided, and not worth it, tour of the chocolate museum (despite all the free chocolate one could want and a chocolate making demonstration.) It was about that time we lost Brandon who wandered off on his own. We wouldn't see him for another four hours or so.

ASIDE: Brandon wandering off was another common theme of the trip

A view of the main plaza

After the museum, we saw the famous statue of the little boy peeing "Manneken Pis" before heading, with Mark's prodding, to the Magritte Museum. René Magritte was a surrealist artist during the 1st half of the 20th century who's most famous works include a man with an apple for a face wearing a bowler hat and a picture of a pipe with the words, "this is not a pipe," printed below. With a student discount, tickets were practically free and was definitely worth the trip inside despite the fact that his most famous works were not there.

After the museum, we met our friend Ethan, who had been studying with us in Salamanca, by a fountain in the park. We decided then to try and find the holy grail of bars known as Delirium. This bar, in the year 2004, held the Guinness world record for most variety of beers with 2004. It was a massive building, with three full floors, space for hundreds, and more beers on tap than you could count. The menu was like an encyclopedia with beers ranging from 2 euro to upwards of 40-50 euro for a single glass. That afternoon I tried Duff, Homer Simpson's brand, and Delirium Tremens, the bar's own brew that at one point was named best beer in the world. It wasn't that great.

The famous "Delirium Cafe"

We went back to the hostel, found Brandon, cooked some pasta for dinner, and decided we didn't want to go out too hard since we were leaving for Amsterdam the next day. Karen too was leaving in the middle of the night for Dublin and we didn't want to abandon her. In the end we went back to Delirium, drank some more, made some friends, and observed some obnoxious Americans singing songs. We tried to speak only in Spanish so the other people in the bar wouldn't look down on us. There is a large amount of anti-American sentiment in Europe an it's pretty easy to see why, although Obama has given our country more international credit that Bush ever did. We came back around 2:30 am and went to sleep knowing the next day we'd be taking a 12:18 train to the Mecca of most college students: Amsterdam.