Waffles and Chocolate - Breakfast of Champions!

I apologize for being MIA for the past couple of weeks, but I was on vacation. Luckily for you I have plenty of stories and photos to share with you about my travels! Three Fridays ago I finished my final exam for our intensive language course, rushed to the main train station, and caught a ride to Brussels, Belgium. We arrived around 11 pm, spent two nights, and arrived back in Freiburg around 11 pm Sunday night. Brussels is the capital Belgium and also the de facto capital of the European Union. Both nights we went out and explored the town and the culture. For being such a popular city, everything seemed to close really early. There was one little street with about 5 bars that stayed open until the wee hours of the morning and that seemed to be where all of the younger people hung out, so we stationed ourselves there for the most part. I met a ton of international students from Spain and France and even one from Germany! I also noticed that most of the beer in Germany has an alcohol content of about 5 percent by volume, but in Brussels the beers were anywhere from 9-11 percent alcohol by volume.

Belgian Waffle with Strawberries
and whipped cream :)

Saturday morning we went out and explored the town. We went to the town square where they had an interesting flea market with fragrances, scarves, handmade jewelry, pottery, and more. We also visited a museum about the famous Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte. We went to a store called the "Beer Temple" where they had hundreds of kinds of beer, we visited many a chocolate shop, and of course we had Belgian waffles. Ohhh, those Waffles...They were amazingly warm and crunchy on the outside and hot and fluffy on the inside. The whipped cream was so delicious and different than in America, and the strawberries were incredibly fresh. And they didn't skimp either; there was a strawberry for every bite! :) 

Brussels Cathedral

On Sunday we had time to kill between checking out of our hotel and heading back to Freiburg, so we walked around the city, visited the Grand Place, got my friend Sonya a coffee fix, and saw the city cathedral. Even though every major European city seems to have a big, historical cathedral, they never fail to floor me with their beauty. Seeing the cathedral might actually rival the waffels for my favorite memory of Brussels. We went on a Sunday and mass happened to be in session, but it was interesting because I noticed that there were actually more people just touring the cathedral that what there were attending the service. The Brussels experience was fun and relatively painless even though the main languages spoken there are French and Dutch. It was funny because I never realized how much German I actually know until I couldn't speak any of the languages around me and found myself responding to the locals in German! All in all, Brussels was a very enjoyable city and I had a good time!