Hitting the Ground Running

(eating pommes frites in the Grand Place)

So anyway, when we landed in Frankfurt, tired and forlorn, we met my brother Zack and got one night's rest before continuing on a 4-day tour of the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands). We drove Friday morning to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the European Union, where we proceeded to get rained on off and on. Brussels, like many old European cities, has a sort of charm which is not diminished in the rain, probably like you would have if you got rained on nearly every day for hundreds of years. Brussels doesn't have a lot of famous sites (except the Mannikin Pis, the statue of a little boy urinating which is the symbol of the city - no one is sure why), so the main tourist attractions involve eating.

I was initially skeptical of this, since the first food I thought of was Brussel sprouts, but apparently that isn't really a hot item here. The four foods you are supposed to eat in Brussels are

1) pommes frites (like French Fries, except that the Belgian apparently invented them, and you're supposed to eat them with mayo instead of ketchup)
2) chocolate (no problem there)
3) waffles (they actually are Belgian, it turns out)
4) mussels (moules in French)

The first three seemed to make sense, but what about these mussels (aside from the fact that they rhyme with Brussels, albeit only in English)? Apparently mussels and pommes frites are to Belgium as a burger and fries are to America, only they're a lot more work to actually consume. At any rate, we ate all of them and saw many old buildings and a pretty amiable beer festival in the rain at the Grand Place. (possibly the best Belgian waffles in the world)