The Muscles from Brussels

So it seems the famous food dish from Brussels is mussels, now we get the "inside joke" on Jean Claude Vandam's nick name.

I'll leave the detailed blog on Brussels to Mariya, I'll just mention a few things that stood out for me. As expected, this was our first enounter on the trip with the French Language. There was a few small miscommunications during the day but once again almost all people spoke english as well (including the large number of beggars that would try french first and then fluidly change to english when they saw it was your language of choice).

The first disappointing thing was we got a bit ripped off on our accommodation. We payed about 130 euros for our hotel room here but to say it was budget would be extremely generous. The bed was lumpy, our window was broken and let a lot of noise in and our shower never got hot. Not great, but what can you do?!

After we checked in we decided to grab a bite to eat at the train station before heading off sightseeing. We tried Belgium's version of MacDonalds called Quick, it was actually very good. We got a couple of different burgers and about 10 kilos of french fries and all you can drink softdrink (like Macca's and HJ's used to do!).

After lunch we headed into the Brussels city centre to the Grand Place. There was a collection of very old buildings in the city square and many photographs were taken as per normal.

We then headed back to the hotel for a few hours to arrange our travel itinerary for our next stop in Belgium, out to Brugge to visit the Belgium Chocolate Museum (awww yea baby!). After we were sorted for the next day we ducked to a local take away shop and grabbed a light dinner before retiring back to the Hotel for the night.

Our stay in Brussels was short and sharp, with some good and bad but I don't think we'll head back to Brussels for awhile either unfortunately =(