Brussels

I'm not so sure about Belgium. I've been to Antwerp twice and now Brussels, and I'm just not sure the country appeals to me. Actually I did quite enjoy Antwerp, they had cooler shops than Amsterdam and a nice center and a real river and good restaurants. But we went to Brussels this weekend and they city didn't really win me over. Ok, a large part of this may have been due to the weather, which, until Sunday, was gray and wet and windy. If it hadn't been so crap, maybe we would have enjoyed a park or sat out on a terrace, but as it was, I was just annoyed with the bottoms of my jeans being constantly wet.

We didn't do many touristy things; we didn't even go to see the Mannekin Pis statue. On the first, wetter day, we wandered around a bit, bought some posh Belgian chocolate, and then hunkered down in a not-to-atmospheric cafe for some beer. Well, I wanted tea actually, but somehow O's order for beer was translated by the waitress into an order for two beers, and she sped off before I could even say "wait, what about my order?" I drank as much of the beer as I could, but O ended up drinking most of mine as well as his, which I'm sure was tough for him. We did have a good dinner though at a Moroccan place that had about a hundred lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

The next day we were more touristy and went to the Atomium, a huge model of an atom that was built in 1958 for a World Expo. It was ok, though I'm not sure it was worth the 7 eur entry fee (which was actually reduced from 9 eur due to "inconveniences" from continuing renovations on the building). The first part was fine actually, you move from sphere to sphere of the atom via stairs or escalators that are quite steep and narrow. There wasn't much to see in the spheres, some basic exhibitions and one psychedelic sphere with black-light art, but it was a novelty and you had some good views sometimes. We then waited though to go up the elevator that takes you to the top sphere. The rest of the visit I could have done without. We waited in line for at least 20 minutes to cram in the elevator and be hurled toward the top of the structure. Up there, we checked out the panorama views, including a look down into Mini Europe, and then I grabbed some food because I was starving and knew I would be very grumpy and headachy if I waited until we went back to the center of town for lunch. The restaurant was overly posh and had no kids' food available, though the place is totally aimed at families. We waited in a shorter line to go back down in the elevator and then puttered back to the center. Things were a bit more lively there because there was the gay parade going on. We got lunch at an Irish pub and sat outside which provided a good view for the parade when it came back around to the main boulevard we were on. That evening we went to the Sleater-Kinney show, which I'll write about eventually.

Sunday was sunnier, so we sat out on the Grand Place for a little while and I had the messy experience of eating a Belgian waffle with chocolate sauce. We also fell into Waterstone's 3-for-2 trap and ended up buying 6 books. One of those though is the Rough Guide to San Francisco. Yay! We then ended up making a mad dash for the next train to Amsterdam because we lost track of the time, only to have it be delayed. Of course. And first they said it had a 5 minute delay, but that turned into a half hour delay, with no updates on when the train was ever going to arrive. Gah.

Our big frustration with Belgium though, which we've now learned our lesson on, is that it is so hard to find cash machines there. We had the same problem with Antwerp, wandering for ages with nary an ATM in sight. This time, when our dwindling cash finally ran out and we needed to somehow pay for lunch, we asked at our hotel where the nearest ATM was. There was one only a couple of blocks away; good stuff. But the machine in the lobby was out of order. It only told you this though after you put your card in, so we all waited in line, put our card in, and then walked off cashless. A machine outside the building was also out of service, but at least it told you straight off. Thankfully, there was a post office next door with the Belgian version of Postbank, so there was an ATM in the lobby. I followed a woman in, who actually wanted stamps, not money, but we both left disappointed when we found both machines to be out of service. We had one last hope, an ING bank across the street, and hey, that's a Dutch company, so this should work (and thank goodness all these banks were so close together because ATMs are so hard to find). We waited in line, put our cards in and got a message telling us that we couldn't get money because we weren't a customer of the bank! Fer fuck's sake! Absolutely worthless. We wandered towards where we wanted to have lunch and fortunately found another bank. We walked into the lobby (they seem to prefer this lobby thing over having the machines outside) and found a long line waiting. I asked O if we really wanted to wait for ages just to find out that we can't have money, but he pointed out that we didn't really have much choice. Amazingly, we were allowed to get money, finally. Next time we go to Belgium, we're bringing the money we need in cash...