CouchSurfing Success and More Beer

April 3, 2010

Even though we were up so late the night before, we wanted to get a good start on the day today. We had a lot of plans in store so Hilary, Sophie and I were up and out of the house by 10am. Our first stop was waffles for breakfast. We went to a street vendor because they are cheap and somehow more delicious than restaurants. I got a waffle with chocolate sauce, strawberries and whipped cream. Best. Breakfast. Ever. Sorry Hans. :)

Next stop was the Cantillon Brewery, which is known for its Lambic beers. Brussels is obviously known for its beer world-wide so we wanted to check out a brewery while we were here. After getting lost a few times we eventually found our way there. The tour was pretty simple, 8 rooms of information and equipment. They gave you a booklet and you took yourself through the tour and then got to taste two of their beers at the end. Lambic beer is really interesting because it is beer made with fruit. I've never had lambic before Brussels but I really like it. It is definitely a chick beer and I can't have too much of it before it becomes to sweet but it's really enjoyable. The fermentation process at this brewery is 3 years. The more normal time is around a couple of months. They use real fruit in their beer and the fermentation process is similar to wine. They also don't add any extra sugar or preservatives which most breweries do so the end result is a dry, sour beer which is different than most sweet lambic beers sold. There is no right or wrong way for this, it is just more an original and updated model.

After the brewery we were headed to the Old Oak Pub to meet up with our next CS host, Estelle and our current CS host and his new two American CS guests for the Manchester United vs. Cheslea. It was a lot of fun and ended up being a big party which included everyone listed above plus Sophie, Kevin's brother and a bunch of their friends. All in all there was probably about 12-15 people in our group. It was so amazing having all of these international people hanging out together. When I think of CouchSurfing the experience I had today is exactly what I pictured. Something like today probably never would have happened without CS and it has been one of my best days so far just because of all the people I got to meet and conversations I was able to take part in with them.

After the game (Chelsea won, sorry Kevin) as we were walking out of the pub we met a guy from Boston who was quite talkative. He was in the army and is now a civil servant for some part of our government. He's been in Brussels for 6 years and is moving back to the states this November. The guy was really nice but not the brightest. At one people we told him we were from Seattle and he responded with "Oh, Seattle, Oregon." Uh - really? Haha. He made a couple other common mistakes and eventually turned to his buddy, took a drink and with real confusion in his voice said, "Dude, am I drunk?!" He was also with his best friend who was the exact opposite of talkative and a very attractive guy from Norway -- talked with him for awhile and got the low down on Norway since we will be there a little more than 2 months. The guy from Boston was really nice and told us to meet up with him tonight and he's buy all of us shots of tequila. I sort of wish we'd taken him up on that, ha.

we went back to Kevin's to pack up our stuff and brought it over to Estelle's place. Estelle is great by the way. It is the first girl we have stayed with and I'm really excited to get to know her. She's super nice and inviting just like everyone else we have met. Plus she loves beer so we pretty much planned the rest of the day around food and beer.

The first place Estelle took us was to a pub called Meoder Lamibic (Meoder = Mother). It was a really cool local bar and they served malted barley seeds with our beers. Never had these before but they were highly addicting. After the bar it was off to find frits (fries). Apparently french fries were originally from Belgium, not France. Why they are called french fries, I have no idea. Estelle didn't seem to know the answer to this either so eventually I'll have to get around to Wikipedia-ing that to figure it out. The frits were so yummy. The best fries I've ever had and they have a bunch of different sauces to choose from, all just as delicious as the next. The best part about these is there were tiny pieces that were pretty much just fried at the bottom and they tasted exactly like potato chips. I was amazed. Obviously this is exactly what potato chips are, but the bottom of fries don't usually take like them! It was great.

Once we devoured a couple orders of these we headed to a local tapas place Estelle frequents for cheap beer and food. On our way there we passed by the biggest courthouse in the world. This building was gigantic. Never would have expected the biggest courthouse in the world to reside in Brussels but you learn something new everyday. The tapas place was good but really smoky and it took forever to get waited on. By the end of the meal we had pretty much spent the whole day drinking and eating on less than 4.5 hours of sleep so we decided to go home and get some sleep.