BRUSSELS – Colors and Craft

Our next layover city was Brussels, Belgium. We arrived in the morning and had until about 4pm to hang out in the city. It was a pretty chilly day compared to all of our other stops, probably about 15-20 degrees cooler than everywhere else. We planned to leave our backpacks in lockers at the train station, but they only took change and we didn’t have the 12 Euros in change we needed and we couldn’t find anywhere to get change. Luckily, at this point in our trip our bags weren’t that heavy. We took this “hop on hop off” bus tour. It was great to be able to see all of the sights from the comfort of a double decker bus. We hopped off at a few places.

I loved all of the old buildings, the architecture was beautiful.

One of the places we stopped was the Atomium. We climbed up to the top and the views were beautiful.

The arms of the Atomium have escalators in them. It was the freakiest escalator ride ever. We went up and then down one. We also took an elevator right up the center pole to the top it had a glass ceiling in the elevator so it was pretty crazy.

We also hopped off the bus to check out The Grand Place or central square of Brussels. We spent quite a bit of time there eating and shopping.

Manneken Pis, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Brussels… not sure how it became so famous, but there were crowds of people taking pictures of the little statue. It was on every list of things to do in Brussels so we decided to stop by. It was on our way to The Grand Place.

We stopped to get Belgian waffles, you can’t even really see the waffle with all of that whipped cream. They were delicious. The waffles are crispy on the outside and so soft on the inside. I bought some sugar pearls so that I can make some here. The sugar pearls add a crunch when you eat the waffle-so good! There are waffle places every where we even got some in the airport. This particular place was right next to Manneken Pis one of the many 1 Euro waffle shops.

While we were in the Atomium, we met a Belgian who told us we needed to get waffles, chocolate and french fries. We were aware of the waffles and chocolate but didn’t know about the fries. So we made sure to go to what some locals said was the best french fry restaurant, Fritland. And there was a line outside. Luckily, a worker motioned for us to come and order inside so we skipped the line-awesome! Nobody realized you can just go inside and order 🙂

The fries were delicious, crispy on the outside and airy on the inside-ha, just like the waffles!

We also bought tons of chocolate from here and some macaroons. I just recently finished the last of my Belgian chocolate, that was a sad day. If we would have had more time in Brussels, there were several chocolate tasting tours I wanted to go on. Unfortunately, they all started before we were arriving that day or going later than we had time for. There are also tours where you can make some chocolate. Maybe next time…

{the macaroons are some of the prettiest I’ve seen}

We spent so much time in train stations on our trip-it was always a fun challenge navigating and making sure we were on the right train-we did pretty well. We have applied to be on The Amazing Race before and didn’t make the cut, so we pretended we were on the race some times when we were lost looking for places 🙂

So long Brussels, we enjoyed your delicious food and beautiful buildings.