Day 10: Brussels

If there's one thing that Brussels has in spades it's chocolate and beer. Ok, ok. Yes, that’s two things. Or, as I like to think of them: two great tastes that taste great together.

Upon arriving in Brussels Thursday morning, we started by taking care of bid-ness - i.e. purchasing train tickets for Germany and finding a hotel. Then, we were off to see the city. First stop: The Grand Place - a big medieval market square, just a short metro ride from our hotel.

After spending about 10 minutes taking pictures of the lovely old buildings in the G.P., we began our gastronomy sight-tasting tour of the city with a visit to the Cacao and Chocolate Museum. The museum (which would be better described as two-room-root-cellar-turned-money-making-venture) invited us in with some scrumptious chocolate biscuits and a 5,50/person (Euro) entry fee. After perusing the educational plaques describing the history of chocolate (N.B. Christopher Columbus liked Chocolate, too.), we were treated to a display of praline making, followed by an interactive session of praline-tasting. Guess which I liked better...

After leaving the World of Chocolate a la Belgique, we were parched. So, naturally, we made our way to the beer museum, just a stone's throw (if you have a Major League arm) from the cacao museum. There we saw a well-crafted video describing the beer-making process, different kinds of beer (including cherry-flavored beer) and Belgium's general megafantasitico prowess in the realm of beer-making.

Once the film ended, we started back up to the bar to collect our sample beer, promised as part of the tour. Sadly, we had not paid much attention to the exact route down the theater area of the museum, so we actually wandered in and out of bathrooms, offices and other places we clearly weren't meant to be until we actually found our way back to the bar. Keep in mind: we haven't actually had anything to drink yet. We're such lightweights, we get drunk just being in a beer museum. (All of my Belgian friends officially disowned me just now, after reading that.)

Next on our agenda was finding an Elvis/1950's Americana themed shop that we found in our French-language Brussels’ travel guide that we'd bought at the Paris train station.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the address in-question, we found that Elvis had succumbed to the bad economy, the wrecking ball or both - as the entire building had been demolished.

No worries - there were still more sights to see, like... the Brussels Comic Museum. The comic museum is a nice historical and technical introduction to comic strips, with 3 floors of exhibit material, including a movie theater and many famous comic characters such as Belgium's own Tintin.

After the museum, we hit not one, but two different places for dinner because our stomachs had decided suddenly that they would no longer be on the same eating schedule. And then we did a little more souvenir shopping before retiring the hotel for the evening.