9.18.22-9.19.22

Booking an Airbnb in the city center was great for convenience, but not for the fact that the buildings are old in the historical part of town and you can hear every single thing that happens around you especially the people arriving upstairs at 12:30 in the morning and walking around for what seems like hours on end. 

Sunday’s plans were to head out to Brugge  for a day trip so we headed to the train station, bought our tickets and we’re on our way. Brugge was just as cute as I remember but now flooded with tourists. Nick has had to continuously remind me that we lived over here in the low season so dealing with tourists now is what I need to expect. Nevertheless, we had a nice day just walking, dipping into places to eat, drink and try chocolates. We attempted to go back to Chez Vincent, a restaurant we remembered fondly as we sat upstairs with a beautiful view of the church out of the window. Our plans were to get frittes to go but sadly they only accepted cash, so we made our way to The Potato Bar where we shared our first frittes and a croquette. 

With no agenda for today we ducked into several breweries, one that sat on the canal and we watched the boat load of tourists one after the other motor past us. 

We next went to Brugge Zot, a brewery where I found I liked their beer when we first arrived. It was a cool vibe with a nice outdoor patio but we chose inside as the whether was quite chilly. We shared a yummy pumpkin soup and beers, and had a nice conversation with a group from California who were on a two week cruise from London to Helsinki. 

With bellies full, we sought out one more treat before heading back, hot chocolate. After a full day of walking, eating and drinking we decided to head back and grab some dinner at our favorite bar near the apartment before calling it an earlier night.  We shared a bowl of bolognese and enjoyed some more tasty beers. 

Our upstairs neighbors have proven to be night owls, returning tonight at 12 am. Even Nick heard them this time, sitting straight up in the bed as it sounded like they were trying to get into our apt. Earlier in the evening I had messaged our host about turning the heat on and noticed he had messaged back after I fell asleep. Because we were up I  soon found myself on a video call with Oscar trying to have him walk me through what would prove not to be a complicated system. He quickly found out the wi fi in the apt is awful because it would not work in the bathroom where the unit was so we ended up exchanging pictures for him to walk me through it. What felt like eternity later, we finally had heat and both tried to get back to sleep once things upstairs settled down.

Monday was a slow morning as we both woke up with sore throats and severe lack of sleep. Thankfully we only had two things on our agenda today. 

First a visit to Cantillion, the number one Lambic style beer in the world, started in 1900 and still family owned to date. From the outside we were not sure we were there, with the push of the huge metal door we were in. There was absolutely nothing fancy about this brewery at all, we decided to do the self guided tour that ended with a sampling at the bar. After enjoying our samples, we shared a bottle of Magic Lambic, brewed with 80% raspberries, 20% blueberries and vanilla. 

With a little time before our next adventure, we grabbed some frittes and walked back to the apt to grab some medicine as we were both still feeling blah, I had hopes the alcohol would help, but it didn’t. I watched some of the Queens funeral, Nick took a quick nap and we were off again. Making our way back to from we had just come, a waffle making glass was next. We were greeted by our teacher, Jose and joined our new friends, Liz and Conner from South Africa, two guys from Singapore, and a girl traveling around Europe, who proudly introduced herself as a nomad.

Nick and I’s experience was fairly quick compared to others and we waited on everyone else to prepare their waffles as we had chose to make the two per person and everybody else choose the ten option. After mixing our ingredients, we moved to the waffle irons and then had a variety of ingredients to chose from. My first selection was powdered sugar, caramel and banana, which turned out to be my favorite.

Tired, we wandered back towards town, had a final beer at Delirium, grabbed sweaters and Uni Qlo and finished our evening with dinner at a true Belgian restaurant, Zotte Mouche. Tomorrow we are off to the Netherlands.