Travelogue: Brussels and Prague

Benson and I are currently bopping around Europe for a couple weeks before he goes to a string of conferences. We are having a lovely time, and I thought I'd give a summary of our trip so far.

Our first major stop was Prague, but we deliberately chose a flight with a nine hour layover in Brussels, Belgium, so that we could explore the city for the day. After the pains of customs, we took a train into the city, and set out exploring. With only about 5-6 hours actually available (since we had to return to the airport to go through security again) we had carefully planned out our top priorities in Belgium. Which is why throughout the day, we went to six different chocolate shops, drank three types of beer, ate waffles, mussels, fries and a local rabbit dish, and, of course, saw the Grand Place and the Mannekin Pis.

We were quite systematic: after our first stop for waffles (with chocolate sauce!) we went to Place du Grand Sablon, which has a lot of little chocolatiers. At each we had a salted caramel filled chocolate to establish a baseline between places. We also chose out a few others at each for some variety. Perhaps our favorite place was Mary, which is apparently the favorite of the royal family, as well. But the other places also had really, really good chocolates: Pierre Marcolini had really good quality CHOCOLATE itself, (and had the cocoa beans on display), Leonidas had the most excellent caramels, and Wittamer had these delicious Grand Marniere chocolates. We also went to Neuhaus and Chocopolis, which I also highly recommended!

Our non-chocolate stops were a lot of fun, too. We went to a lovely bar with all sorts of local beers, which were quite nice. Grand Place was beautiful. The pissing kid (as we called him) was.... as expected? I guess? It's this little fountain depicting a child peeing. The church outside of which he resides dresses him up in different outfits on regular basis. It was... weird. The restaurant we went to for lunch was quite tasty. (Our main focus was clearly on food sampling.) At this point, we hadn't really slept in 24 hours due to flights and time direness and while Benson deals with jet lag pretty well, I was exhausted. So I slept for the 3 hour plane ride to Prague after that.

On arriving in Prague, we schlepped through public transport and made our way to our hotel, then, after unpacking, we went to a nearby Czech restaurant for dinner. In general, Czech food is kind of similar to the German food we have had: heavy, an emphasis on meats, and best washed down with a nice glass of Pivo (beer, and the only word of Czech that I learned). The food is quite tasty. The beer was WONDERFUL. I miss the beer already, seriously. All the beer we had in Prague was good. And in general, it was dirt cheap. I'm not just talking about the (admittedly quite good) exchange rate between dollars and Czech crowns, but beer is usually cheaper than soda, or on par. And it's everywhere!

The food was also good - as you might expect, there is a lot of pork, very good sausages. We had some really good stews (venison, pork), potato dumplings, roasted pork, more sausage, pickles, pretzels, an interesting cheese dish whhich consisted of pickled Brie with a spicy pepper salad of sorts (we were skeptical, but it was QUITE good), head cheese, some amazing fresh potato chips at an outdoor marketplace, and a   personal favorite: fried cheese on a bun - like a giant mozzarella stick, with grease in all the right places. We had that about three times as a snack. Almost every day, we went to a a lovely bakery type place called Paul, which had all sorts of goodies for breakfast. There were also a few non-Czech places we tried, on the recommendations of the book "Where Chefs Eat" which gives recommendations for the best restaurants in a large number of major cities. In fact, our first full day in Prague we hit the trifecta of recommendations for Prague: Paul, Limonada, and Itchnusa, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All three were really great - we went to Itchnusa twice, in fact.

Prague itself was also wonderful. In general, the architecture was gorgeous. Benson said that if we took a picture of every gorgeous building in Prague, we'd have the equivalent of a Google street view map. My mother, when telling me about HER trip to Prague, described it as like a fairy tale, and I could see why. It felt very old, and beautiful, and its a city you can very easily travel mostly on foot. Honestly, the cars and the few modern buildings felt very much out of place. We had four whole days of Prague, which was a good amount - we actually planned on doing a day trip out the last day, to a castle an hour away, but that fell through and we just spent our last day exploring some of the smaller museums. These included the gastronomic museum (a history of food prep), an alchemy museum which included going into underground tunnels beneath Prague which led to a secret alchemy lab (and was behind a bookcase, classic!), and the KGB museum, where we got to see lots of the stuff issued to KGB agents and similar items - plus got to hold them and play around with them in some instances!

But there were many nice big ticket items in Prague (besides wandering around enjoying the atmosphere, which took up a good bit of our time, if not most of it). Prague Castle took up most of one day- you could get tickets to tour the various parts of it, from the art gallery, to the towers, to the actual window where the defenestration of Prague took place (such a great word, defenestration), to the Golden Lane where people such as Kafka lived. Really cool! The Prague astronomical clock in the old town square was extremely neat: it gave the location of the sun, the zodiac sign, the phase of the moon, the time, the old Prague time (splitting daylight into twelve even chunks) sunrise and sunset, and date. Every hour, the apostles will spin around while death chimes the hour. We wandered the Jewish quarter and across the Charles Bridge, went to the National Gallery of Art, went to the Vysehrad castle/fortress and the lovely cathedral there, where we happened upon a children's chorus giving a performance. That castle was also lovely for watching the sunset. We ended our trip by going to the Prague State Opera on Saturday, where we saw Carmen, happily with English subtitles as well as Czech.

And from the, it was on to Italy! Where I currently am. We are staying with a friend of Benson's from UCSB, in a town that is about two hours north of Rome, Capodimonte. But more on that in another blog post, I think!