Belgium: Brussels & Chimay

Tuesday Cao and I took a train to Brussels. The train station wasn't in the best area, as they never are, but we made the best of it by visiting a brewery in the area. It was the first brewery I've ever visited, and so, it was pretty educational. We got to see all the steps to making beer, and in this particular case Spontaneous Fermentation, the original method of brewing. The factory was the Cantillon Brewery which produces one of the few remaining traditional Lambic beers in the world.

The main beer they produce there is called Gueuze which is a bit sour, but also very sweet and tastes almost like Champagne. They also use their Lambic beers to make Kriek and other fruit beers. They're all really sweet and don't taste like beer at all. Pretty interesting I thought.


I also got to see some fake iPods on our walk to the hostel, which was pretty nice. It was pretty funny, I've seen the knockoff iPods on the Internet plenty of times, but I finally saw them in person. The hostel was good. There was a kitchen and a lounge with a TV, some tables, a cheap vending machine, and a few computers. Our room was as to be expected, large, with lots of bunk beds (for 14 people). It was quite an experience sleeping in a room with that many people. Everyone seemed pretty nice and basically sat around trading stories about their travels, pretty interesting and helpful.


Our first night we did some tourism stuff in the city. We saw the Bourse, the Belgian stock exhange, Manneken Pis, a very small peeing boy statue/fountain and got a waffle, very good, very touristy. After that we checked out the Grand Place and the Cathedral Sainte-Gudule.





On Wednesday morning we took a train from Brussels to Charleroi, where we searched for about 45 minutes to find the one ATM in the city haha. There were plenty of banks but they only accepted to exclusive Belgian cards. Then we took a bus to Chimay in search of my favorite Trappist Beer.


Turns out the Brewery wasn't actually in the town of Chimay but 7Km away. Desperate, we walked. We finally arrived at the Bottling factory. Where we bought some Chimay for very very cheap. We also tried to take a tour, but they weren't offering them at this time of the year. The Abbey and other Trappist related sites were also closed. But it was still worth it, I think. Plus we get to say we walked almost 15Km.




Thursday before the train we hit up a Flea Market in a town square in Brussels. We also went back to the Grand Place during the day and visited the Palace of Justice, which was incomprehensibly large. There was some pretty cool graffiti on some of the buildings in the area too. Finally we took the train back to Paris at around 4.



Brussels was a lot of fun and had a ton of stuff to do. I'd definitely go back to see more of the sites and maybe to go to Chimay again. However, I think I'd want to take a car if that were the case.