We departed Paris by bus and arrived in Brussels with plenty of daylight left to explore our local neighborhood. We visited this city VERY briefly in 2013. I remember getting off the train with our backpacks in the pouring rain, looking like drowned rats and not being well received by the buttoned up establishments in the downtown core.
This time, we stayed on the city’s northwest Laeken district, not touristy but with a view of one attraction - Atomium, built for the 1958 World’s Fair when atomic everything was popular. We went for a walk to have a look at it, but the weather changed abruptly, and within minutes we were drowned rats in Brussels again. We ran home.
The neighborhood was very multi-cultural and trendy with as many independent breweries and organic co-ops as halal butchers and Moroccan tea houses, as many women in hijab as dudes with top knots. Our hosts were firmly in the hipster camp. These ones didn’t go to Kanab but were off on a two-month trip of Europe with their toddlers by bike and train. They left lots of bread making materials and exotic one-off ingredients that I made sure to try. It also had some great parks to explore, where we found things like an impromptu New Orleans style jazz concert on the steps of a church.
On Sunday we took a longer walk to the city center and its main sites. The Grand Place is definitely worth a look, with its amazing, intricate, gold-plated architecture shining in the sun. We did the touristy thing and got a waffle. You can get these stacked high with all kinds of toppings, but locals eat them plain and by hand, and that's what we did.
We went on to the Midi train station which hosts an enormous Sunday market. Mostly stuff we don't need, like plants, clothes, and household items, but also produce, bread, and pretty much all our ingredients for the week. Nathan delivered them home while I walked back through the central area to taste all the chocolate shops. I also looked up, Brussels is full of street art!
Thursday was our 15th wedding anniversary! We already planned on cooking a special meal at home, but at the last minute we decided to try again to get up close to Atomium, this time to go inside. You can take a series of escalators and stairs between the balls. Some have Worlds Fair memorabilia, trippy light shows, or viewpoints to look out over Brussels and down on another attraction, 'Mini Europa.' We weren't going to pay to see that one, but it was fun to try to identify the mini-monuments from above.
We checked out Friday. Time for another rental car and a detour to revisit another stop from our 2013 trip - a distant relative in Rekem, Belgium. Mario had a nice lunch for us on his patio and I brought dessert, a taste of America in my grandma’s apple cake. Like her, Mario has lived his whole life in the same town (though he traveled the world VERY extensively) and is now a volunteer in one of the museums. We got the insiders’ tour with special access to places like the church roof and the old apothecary that was reconstructed across the square.
Rekem was only a couple hours from Brussels, but being right on the Netherlands border, we were firmly outside of francophone territory (Belgium's other official languages are Dutch and German) so I'm back to being a complete illiterate. It took us no time to get to our next home in the Netherlands - our last country for this trip!
