Leg #6 of Euro Tour - BELGIUM
>> Monday, January 31, 2011
Another major stopover on our trip was Brusseles (while we were on the way from Amsterdam to Paris). And let me tell you - it was quite a big disappointment. To start with, no one really speaks English. At some point I had to go to a bus stop and literally cry out loud asking strangers if anyone new any English - only one lady stepped out, and her accent was...well, just blah, barely recognizable.
One girl in our party was dead set to get some Belgian chocolate - we ended up spending about 2 hours looking for a specific brand (which I know for sure is Belgian), and no one has even heard of it there. That's ridiculous. In the end we just had to get ourselves Belgian waffles as a compromise - and I didn't even take pictures of those, as by that time we were exhausted of walking around.
Also, Brusseles was the first city on our tour that didn't really look like Europe - or rather didn't match up with my expectations of the European capital. Most of the stores we were entering looked really poor and cheap, a lot of places were closed or abandoned, most of the people on the streets were Arabic-African crowd - so overall, it looked like a cheap town somewhere in Eastern Europe right after the end of USSR, and nothing like EU capital.
To top the story, we spent about 2 hours driving around and trying to find our way out of Brusseles, as the road signs were extremely complicated and at times were showing the wrong directions!!!
As we were leaving Brusseles, we also noticed that one of our tires was once again showing the signs of getting flat. We didn't think much of it then, and later that turned out to be a major mistake on our part. More on that in the next post about our time in Paris!
