I was planning on going to Brussels with a cousin for my birthday weekend but she couldn’t make it after all. Luckily I have many great cousins and another one stepped in.
We arrived in Brussels Friday night and got ready for a night out to celebrate, or perhaps more like forget in my case, that I was a year older. We ate at cheese cake café, their selection is good and they have some interesting drinks, the server seemed stressed though so the service wasn’t the best, but we soon discovered this was the norm here. At least the food was good. After dinner we went to an Irish bar I had read was good. Here I discovered they do something very similar to (but not quite as good as) Diesel in Brussels. If you haven't heard of it, it's beer, cider and blackcurrant, and I love it. The music was great in this bar but it didn’t get busy enough for us, so we headed just down the street to a karaoke bar. This place was packed, and the nightclub upstairs was too packed for us, so we stayed in the karaoke room. The music was great and we sang along to some, we talked to some interesting people and we even danced a little. By the time I was ready to leave it was 4am. Sorry Tonje.
We got up after about 5 hours sleep and started the shopping day at Primark round 10am. We were a little disappointed to find that the New Look shops were closed, but we found some cool things in Primark and other shops. We ate lunch at Hard Rock Café, we were told there was a bit of a wait, but after about 10 min a table was ready. Once again we got the feeling our server was a bit stressed though, we felt the order got a bit mangled, and it wasn't always easy to get a hold of our server, but the food was alright. We shopped until we HAD to get back to the hotel, we needed a nap before getting ready for a Saturday night out in Brussels. After about an hour of sleep we got our glitter on and went out to find some dinner. We ended up at a pub like restaurant at Grand Place, again it took longer than we liked to get hold of our server whenever we needed something, resulting in me not going for that extra drink with my meal. But the food was really good and we got stuffed after eating only half of our meals.
After dinner it was time for a bar crawl, we managed to get a hold of the server just in time, and ran our the door at 21:30 on the dot. Luckily we were meeting at Grand place so we were good. As the meeting point was not at a bar I was a bit scared we’d be standing outside for a long time, like we did in Budapest, but I was glad to hear the guide say we’d be leaving shortly after just 10 minutes. And it wasn’t too cold out either, which was a nice change from the 20cm of snow and minus degrees we have in Norway.
At the first bar we were told to find a seat and the guide would go get us a beer, this was quite brilliant as we all sat close together then and started getting to know each other. The crawl was a bit different from most I’ve been on, but it was organized, we were told the deals and when to be outside before we went into each bar and we had a really fun night getting to know some new people and dancing our asses off. We had planned on getting to bed a bit earlier this night, but as we had so much fun we didn’t end up leaving that mush earlier.
On our last day in Brussel we had to check out at 10am, which was a bit tough after getting little sleep again, but we managed, just. We still had hours left before heading to the airport though, so we went for a walk. We got drinks from McDonalds, and then walked around for a couple of hours before starting to look for a place to find some food. This turned out to be more difficult than I had thought. The fist place we went to didn't serve food (even though their menu suggested the kitchen would open about 20 minutes after we sat down). So we had to find somewhere else and between us wanting breakfast/lunch food not dinner, and me being picky, this was not easy. We ended up at Hard Rock Cafe again. It wasn't busy this time so we got seated right away. After Hard Rock it started getting wet and chilly outside so after seeing the famous Manneken Pis we went to the waffle factory, so I could sit down with a waffle with strawberries and chocolate, and Tonje could heat up a bit with a hot chocolate. Then I just needed to get one geocache in before heading back to the hotel, I ended up with a quick virtuel cache at the Grand Place. Then it was time to get the luggage and head to the airport. We were getting tired and it was becoming evident that Tonje was coming down with something, so it was best to just get to the airport so we could relax at the gate. So, in summary; a hectic weekend with some fun, some shopping and a little sightseeing. I don't feel like Brussels is a city I have to go back to again, but I don't mind it. All in all it was a good way to celebrate/forget that I'm one year older.
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