Hi everyone! Since our last check in we've been busy little bumble bees, checking out beautiful Belgium!
We got a 4 hour bus from Paris to Brussels to begin the Belgium adventure. We were told not to bother with Brussels from fellow travellers, but being a large city it was the easiest and cheapest to reach from Paris, so one night in Brussels was decided. We rocked up to Brussels midi station (the slightly out of town station) and walked through the ghetto, waiting to be stabbed at any moment, stepping over piles of rubbish and dodging poo, until we found our safe haven, the largest hostel we've ever seen! We were later told by the staff at the hostel to avoid the area we had walked straight through from the station..ahh Brussels rookies! Brussels wasn't as bad as we were expecting, with a good hostel, an awesome Italian dinner, beer, funny Americans to share a room with and waffles with chocolate, cream and strawberries, any town can seem 100x better!
Next stop was our favourite, beautiful Brugge (Bruges..depending if your French or Dutch!) Belgium is divided into three languages.. South speaking French..north speaking Dutch and somewhere close to Germany speaking German.. So we stuck with practicing our English. Which was easy, as soon as we would say "hallo" (Dutch for hello), they would say "English"? And start speaking English to us. Ah the relief to be able to go up to a cash register and not worry about speaking French was nice. We loved Brugge straight away.. A quick walk from the station to our hostel, another nice hostel which is always a relief, we were in walking distance to the main square, and the whole town is cobble stoned streets with teeny houses and people riding their bikes everywhere. We got straight to business in Brugge.. Chocolate shops... Fries..and then beer! We went to a bar that sells 400 different beers.. It's a little overwhelming to look at that menu so we let the bar man choose for us.. We only managed to taste about 10 different beers..the IPA's being our favourite..cherry beer came in second for me and passion fruit came dead last.
2 nights in Brugge allowed us another whole day in town..with sunshine!! Only one jumper required, woohoo! A boat ride down the canals to start the morning, Then we hired bikes like the locals (or like the tourists?!) and rode around. we were enjoying our bike ride so much, that at one point we looked around and noticed we couldn't see Brugge anymore.. And we were surrounded by sheep.and farms and dirt roads.. Turns out we rode our butts straight out of town.. The sign that said Brugge with a large Red Cross through it probably should have given that away. Sore legs and bums later we handed in our bikes again.. Tried some 'Flemish' food..which we think now was just a tourist scam.. Flemish stew and cheese croquettes are shit.
Time for Ghent.. A pit stop between Brugge and Antwerp so we thought why not spend a night here too! Little picturesque Ghent was another nice town to visit..the beautiful weather definitely helped.. 22 degrees meant tshirts!! Not even one jumper. Heaven! We visited a castle, sorry I forgot what it's called and am currently writing this in a laundromat with no wifi to googs it, then Panos for lunch (our favourite cheap Belgium panini store), walked the streets, the canal and sat/napped in a park in the sun! Our hostel served gigantic spaghetti bols for dinner so we had beers and spaghetti on our hostel terrace and played Yahtzee all night like true crazy young backpackers do!
Antwerp is today's adventure.. A quick stop before Amsterdam. The weather is a bit crappy and we're a little over the sightseeing today, so we walked around town, got rained on..sat in a coffee shop for a couple hours and sat on their wifi.. Found a graffiti mural and are now sitting in above mentioned laundromat doing our washing for the first time in a couple weeks. Laundromat = more detailed blog than usual.
All up we've loved Belgium. Brugge coming in for the win as favourite town, a must see for any future European travellers. We've had some of the best food of our trip here, especially the pasta.. We've eaten pasta 3 nights out of 5 here. As long as we make it through the night (our current hostel is possibly a brothel that makes us feel like we're A) already in Amsterdam or B) in the backstreet of Asia about to be sold to the highest bidder), we're off to Amsterdam tomorrow for a couple nights! Weeeeeeeeeee :)
