Spieler Urlaub: Brusselsprouts and Waffles

So after spending my second day in Germany finishing up the last of my finals for winter term, Carolin and I embarked upon our euro vacation with plans to see Brussels, Gent and Amsterdam. That's right, Amsterdam. I remember when I was a bit younger, and I could only dream of the thought to see Amsterdam. I could name a few people who I wish were going to meet me there, but that's for another day. We got up pretty early that next morning and hopped on the Autobahn. If you’ve never driven on the German Autobahn, and like to go fast, you should probably book a flight over here and rent a nice German Auto. I cant elaborate enough on how amazing the Autobahn is. It’s like your going 160kmh and people are passing you going what looks to be twice the speed you’re going. And if you like nice cars, you should definitely come here. I swear all of the cars that passed us on the Autobahn were my dream cars, especially the Audis that you cant get in the states.

We moved at a relatively slow pace (150kmh) and had a great time listening to the radio stations here. Pretty funny story as well. They love to play every genre of music on the same station. Dance music, classic rock, David Bowie from the early days, fairy tale music and so on. I would recommend bringing your own CDs if you plan to drive a lot here. It took about four and a half hours and two countries besides Germany before we got to Brussels. It was a cool sight to see and there was a very international presence among the people. After we spent 30 minutes battling the Cairo like traffic we finally reached a good parking space right in the city center. We wound up walking around the city for 3 hours stopping a lot to look at all the chocolate and had a few beers. We visited a nice church, one you would think of from a creepy exorcist like movie, but it was fun. It was kind of a dreary day and wound up raining after a few hours, so we posted up in a nice restaurant and had some beer and crepes with Belgium chocolate. It’s funny how people will eat chocolate covered crepes with beer for dinner. So wrong, but so right.

We decided to leave because of the rain and wanted to start our journey for Gent. Carolin has a friend from school who is working out of Gent between the term, and she was very happy to be our tour guide. Carolin and I thought it would be cool just to cruise back into Brussels the next day because our tour was cut short because of the rain and its only an hour or so drive from Gent. But after we spent well over an hour trying to navigate out of Brussels (probably a 2 km drive), which included lots of frustrations, we decided that it would be best to chalk Brussels as a loss and enjoy the time that we did spend there. With Gent on our next list of places to go, and me having literally no knowledge of what Gent was all about, we made our venture onward not looking back. This was probably the best decision I’ve ever made.

Here are some photos of Brussels. It was dreary so a lot of the architectural shots are better for a photo book later on. Enjoy!