Brussels (and Ypres)
Rather than the usual bus, I decided to splurge on a Eurorail train to my next destination. This consisted of waiting in perhaps the longest line I have ever waited while we went through security and passport check. Once we were finally on the train, I sat next to a lovely English woman and a Belgian man with his daughter. We chatted throughout the two hours we traveled discussing politics, culture, and traveling. Already, the trip was off to a great start. This was unfortunately dampened when I got to my hostel and was told I would have to switch rooms in the middle of my stay for no reason.
The next morning, I walked towards the city center to have some lunch and take a free walking tour. I stopped at a delicious spring roll restaurant, enjoying three scrumptious wrapped flavors. Afterwards I stopped at a beautiful church nearby where they were holding a Saturday service. The wealth of incredible churches has to be one of my favorite things about Europe. Around every corner is a peaceful place to enjoy a quiet moment. On the way to the square I walked past a big old government building and another church.
I next joined up with the free walking tour in the square. We had a bombastic guide who seemed to make up for his apparent lack of historic knowledge with random stories and gratuitous bravado. While this seemed to entertain some of the younger tour members, I was less impressed. We did walk by a number of beautiful buildings, including a humongous church that I made a note to visit later in my stay.
In the evening I took a beer tasting tour that went through multiple pubs and gave an outline of the history and interesting elements of Belgian beer. Belgian beer is vast in character and taste, though does tend towards the sweeter side of the spectrum (I.e. they don’t really do IPAs). Perhaps the best known Belgian beers are those many by the Trappist monks (a number of the finest Belgian Tripel style beers are made by the Trappists) and the lambic style beers (what we would refer to in the US as a “sour” beer, which are fermented using wild yeasts). I will say that while Colorado beers are different, our beer scene could certainly give the Belgian one a run for it’s money! After the beer tour I joined up with some new friends to go on a pub crawl into the night. I made some lovely friends, drank a bunch of cheap beer, and ate a huge meat sandwich. The sandwich’s French name translates to “machine gun” in English.
The next morning I met a new friend in my hostel room, Midis. Midis and I went out for coffee and lunch before taking a trip to the musical instrument museum. Midis had to be one of the kindest, most optimistic people I’d ever met. I hope that I’ll be able to squeeze in a visit to Finland to visit him.
After lunch, Midis and I went to quite an interesting little museum that housed a vast array of international musical instruments. The museum supplied an audio guide that allowed one to listen to short clips for many of the instruments, which ranged from spectacular to downright atrocious. The bottom floor covered “automatic” instruments, much like the wind up piano one would find in the saloon in the first season of HBO’s Westworld.
The next floor contained a wide variety of string and flute style instruments, ranging from common ones like accordions to various pre-violin implementations (check out the extremely tiny violin) and even some eastern European bagpipes (who knew they had bagpipes in Serbia?). These ranged greatly in age and in quality of sound. For Legend of Zelda fans, there were a number of ocarinas there (my pic is terrible, sorry). I didn’t even know that was a real instrument.
The final floor covered a wide variety of keyboard style instruments, many of which were covered in extravagant and highly detailed artwork. I particularly enjoyed these. Also, though I somehow forgot to take any pictures of them, they had about 40 different versions of the saxophone and some horn instruments. The inventor of the saxophone was Belgian, and he made numerous instruments, only a few of which most people have ever seen.
After the museum, Midis and parted ways and I went to have a Belgian waffle. Perhaps I was just hungover, but I found it to be too sweet and only ate a bit of it. After my waffle I took a walk through town towards the church I’d wanted to visit.
