We originally had planned on taking a train to Versailles to see the palace and gardens, but we quickly realized that if we decided to spend the amount of time needed to do anything else we hadn't seen already, we would risk not being able to get on a train to Brussels (and i didn't really do any research on what to do for that leg of the trip for some reason) so we decided to check out of the hotel and make our way to the train station in north Paris. It's a good thing we did because the train station was huge and confusing. To make matters worse, when we finally did figure out what train went to Brussels we found out that it was going to cost us 160 euro for two tickets. That was a pretty big let down since we were planning on it being not even half that, but we totally took some time and rationalized how it was ok since we had saved so much money on all the other trips we had taken so far and saved so much money thanks to our friends who've let us stay with them on the trip.
After eating lunch in the train station we checked in for our trip and climbed onto the train and discovered our seat numbers for our last minute ticket purchase put us in a small awkward 8 seat compartment close to the entry of the car so we had a lot of bathroom traffic and the noise of the very close sets of hydraulic doors opening and closing over and over. After we got rolling we noticed that the train was going fast. VERY fast. 330 KPH fast! I had never experience anything like it in my life. It felt like we were flying 5 feet off the ground. It all made sense then why the train was so expensive. It was a bullet train and got us to Brussels in an hour instead of 2 or more. The man sitting next to us was from Holland and was making his way home from Libya. He was very friendly and chatted with us about what to do in Brussels, where we are from, among other things. Once we got into Brussels we discovered that a country who's primary two spoken languages are french and dutch is not very english speaker friendly. They have some signs in english but it is very random, and the main things we needed to know were not easy to understand. We figured out that they had an underground so we took the train to where we thought we needed to be but we realized that even though our hotel name had "City Center" in it's name it was actually south of the actual city center.
After nearly two hours of wandering around trying to find the hotel we got checked in and napped for a bit before taking the train (which we finally figured out how it worked) into the city center where Delirium Bar is.
Delirium is a belgian brewery in Brussels who's two main beers "tremens" and "nocturn" are available all over the world and is very well known for its interesting grey bottles with labels covered in pink elephants.
I had been excited since the beginning of the trip to visit this bar and see their list of over 2000 bottled beers as well as countless taps.
I had a Hercule stout which was billed as the only belgian stout, and Amy had the Tremens. I wasnt a big fan of the stout but it was awesome to get to try something new. The tremens was good as always. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys golden ales.
I wanted to go to a bar called Morte Subite, but we couldn't find it and decided to eat dinner. We found a street close to Delirium that had a ridiculous amount of restaurants who were all trying to coax us in to eat. As much as I wanted muscles and frites, every place we saw was very expensive so we decided on italian, and sat outside at a point where the street was more open and far less crowded.
Amy and I ordered pizza which was great, and then wandered all the narrow streets which were all lined with patios of brasseries. People were all so happy and social everywhere we went.
Amy eating the smallest piece of pizza ever.
One thing I have to mention is that the weather has been really incredible during this entire trip. Paris and Brussels were beautiful and we were very lucky to have such warm weather.
SO, before heading back to the hotel on the train, we cut through the main square which was incredibly ornate and massive. The pictures I took do it no justice. We laid down in the middle of the cobblestone square and stared up at the sky for a while.
Tomorrow we go to Bruges.
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