More Good Food & Beer

After a day of walking around the historic town center of Brussels, I am happy to report that there are some really clean and really nice parts of town, but it smells like pee in lots of areas!  Perhaps the fact that a statue called the Manneken Pis (Dutch for little man urinating) is a famous Brussels landmark should have given me a hint of what to expect…

We started our day at Grand Place square, the central market square of Brussels and probably the nicest square we’ve been to so far.  The Town Hall and guild houses surrounding the square are in impeccably good condition, decorated with gold trim and elaborate carvings, and it seems like they’ve put a lot of effort into keeping the paint fresh and the stones clean.  As I went around taking pictures, Paul had a craving for ice cream so we picked up a Belgian waffle with chocolate ice cream, our first taste of the famous Belgian sweets.  It was as good as expected, but a bit too chocolaty for me that early in the day so I only ate one bite

While taking pictures, we noticed a group of three monks from Thailand and when we looked their way they said hi and struck up a conversation with us, asking where we were from and what we were doing in Brussels.  We conversed with them for a bit (when we said we’re heading to Thailand next year they told us we should visit their hometown which is near Phuket) and then headed towards the museum area, which Luc had told us had some nice gardens and interesting architecture.

On our way, I decided to try an order of French fries with mayo, another food item that Belgium is famous for.  While the fries here are definitely better than the ones we get back home, we find that eating fries alone is rather boring and we don’t know how anyone feels good after eating an entire cone of French fries – after half the cone I felt like I had a pool of grease forming in my stomach and I started looking for pigeons to feed some fries to.  Oddly enough there were no pigeons around so I had to throw my leftover fries in the garbage when I finally admitted defeat and decided I wouldn’t be able to eat the entire cone.

We finished off our sightseeing by stopping by the Manneken Pis, which really is just a statue of a little boy peeing on top of a fountain.  There are several myths about the significance of this little boy, mostly related to some story about him saving Brussels by peeing on something (e.g. a fire), but I don’t think that there is any real reason he is a famous landmark of Brussels.  At the time we saw him he was just a naked little boy peeing, but apparently he has over 600 costumes and is very often dressed (we did see postcards with pictures of him dressed but we thought they were photo-shopped!).

In the evening, we headed out to the area by Sainte-Catherine, where we had gotten off the tram yesterday, in order to try another restaurant Luc had recommended for moules frites, another Belgian specialty.  Unfortunately, when we tried to order we found out that mussels aren’t currently in season in Brussels!  Since most of the dishes were between 20-30 euros per plate and the only thing we really wanted on the menu was mussels, we decided to leave and went back to Le Fin de Siecle for a second time.  This time I tried the roast lamb and Paul tried the rabbit cooked in Kriek.  Again, both were superbly cooked dishes, but I don’t think anything can beat the carbonnades dish we had yesterday!  Le Fin de Siecle is definitely one of our favourite restaurants of all time, though, and it seems like they can’t cook anything wrong!  I wish we could eat like this everyday…