Hundreds of bottles of beer on the wall!

You know you´re in a good place when you´re visiting a chocolate museum in the morning and a beer factory in the afternoon - with samples included of course! Belgium was definitely a treat for the tastebuds.

Apparently there are over 300 beers in Belgium. We were like kids in a candy shop with all our favourite beers from the Belgium beer cafes in Sydney, and more, on offer for only 2 euro each! Winners included the infamous Kwak, Grimbergen, Judas and Bush (12%!). The handmade chocolates, hot waffles, frites with mayo and flemish beef beer stew all confirmed that Belgians sure know how to eat well!

Scenic highlights included seeing the grand square of Brusselses and bumping into a massive street party of 2000 or so uni students moving down the street with a line of 10 open semi-trailers that were pumping out dance music and serving out gallons of beer to the students holding up glasses, plastic jugs, buckets and anything else they could find! Who said Brussels was boring!?

We also visited the smaller towns of Brugges and Gent where we wandered the cobble stone streets, admired the gothic architecture, explored the canals and took in the ghostly city lights at night.

While it all might sound very glam, there are definitely down sides to being a budget traveller... one being the bedbugs that took a liking to Em´s shoulder and arm. The other downer is that it´s getting very cold and we are running out of warm clothes to layer! As a result Em has invested early in a pair of fluffy snow walking boots which she is sporting under her jeans!

Following up from our last blog, the prize for the fastest and best french translation goes to Julia Mackie who perfectly translated our french spiel with the following....

"Paris was great! We were busy because we were learning lots at French school, we made new friends and of course saw all the sights of Paris. We tried to discover as much as possible about French culture, even though once we ate fast food and also went to the cinema to see the American film, '40 year old virgin'. We hope to come back to Paris soon, but above all we hope that we will have able to have a conversation when we take the cable car at Les Arcs! We will have to practice a lot for the next month!"

Thanks Julia for also confirming that we actually made sense!

After a quick overnight stay in the Dutch town of Maastricht, we are now in Berlin where it is forecast to snow on the weekend! Fingers crossed that we get this novelty as compensation for freezing our butts off!


Huge main square of Brussels, Belgium

A small section of the student street party in Brussels - well and truly cranking at 5pm!

The canals of Brugges, Belguim

Array of beers in a Belgium bottle shop

Like a pig in mud!

We like the simple answer the chocolate museum gives to this age-old question! Nice in theory.... (Click on picture for closer view)

Gent, Belgium

The canals of Gent at night

The nightlights of Gent are so good that they´re UNESCO listed (although admittedly everything seems to be UNESCO listed for something around Europe!!)