tourist waffles

We started the trek to Brussels early in the morning. So early, in fact, that the hostel had not yet put out breakfast. St. Christopher's Inn next to Gare du Nord has the best bread and butter. I thought I was going to marry all of the bread and butter in France. By "marry", I mean consume. Anyway, being denied early access to breakfast, Mattie, Christine, and I headed to Gare du Nord, stomachs empty and anxious to find our train. If you're wondering where Maxine is, we had to abandon her because her love of French lingerie kept her detained. We got to the station much too early, so the logical thing to do was have Christine run (literally, run) back to the hostel to grab an entire plastic bag of bread. She ended up slipping, scraping her knees on the well-paved streets of Paris. You can take the girl out of France, but then France will try to maim her. Paris is feisty. The bread was really good though.

Once in Brussels, it was also too early for anything to be open. With Mattie's data-enabled phone (everyone, take note that AT&T sucks and T-Mobile is the only one who understands study abroad needs) and a shitty map in hand, we made our way through the fog to the hostel. Understand that up until this point, we'd been enjoying balmy -gasp- mid-sixty degree Fahrenheit weather. That, to us, was like a SoCal summer after having been in the UK for four months. So off into the cold we go, finally finding refuge in our hostel. This hostel was luxury compared to what we had been staying in. PRIVATE BATHROOM + ONLY THE THREE OF US IN THERE. By this destination, we had walked about 10+ miles a day, so we were ready to have a chill day in Brussels.

Apparently, you can do Brussels in a day, and we had this nifty map to tell us how. The highlights of this have to be us wandering around for cheap Chinese food in Belgium and somehow wandering into a very interesting market place. This particular marketplace was peculiar because everyone was only there to watch it end. Once it ended, a lot of the vendors actually gave away a lot of their wares for free or abandoned it on the ground. Or maybe the highlights of this leg of the trip was scarfing down cheap uncooked convenience store veggies because we are cheap and had a bouquet of pommes frites earlier (fancy fries/chips to you) and dancing contemporary dance in our beautiful, private hostel room.

Whatever the case...pay attention to those waffles in this video. Gor-geous.