"That's a lot more countries than I've been in with a lot of people."

Saturday I mostly spent waiting around for my mom and Shuli to arrive, although I did go to yoga and H&M :). They finally called me saying they got to their hotel at like 4 or 5pm. We walked over to my place, and I showed them the apartment and we tried to book tickets to Brussels and stuff. That ended up being way more complicated than expected, but eventually we made it to dinner.

I was starving, and so excited for Cafe de Flore. It's a famous cafe in St Germain de Pres (quickly becoming my fav neighborhood of Paris). It's been around for a hundred years or more or whatever, and Picasso, Hemingway, and Sartre hung out there, among others. Pretty cool. And the food was still awesome. We split quiche, onion soupe, grapefruit salad, salmon, and foie grois and lentils and a bottle of wine between all of us.

And then we went for dessert at Cafe de Flore -- profiteroles, chocolate tarte, and chocolate ice cream. Mmm.

Next we made our way over to O'Neil's, a microbrewery in Paris, right around the corner from Rue Princesse. We had fun there, and had a couple beers. My mom went home, and Shuli and I went to Frog & Princess for a couple more beers. At like 1am we found some street crepes, came home (Shuli stopped for pullups on the way, of course), and then passed out.

Sunday morning we woke up at 6:50am...ew. We made it to our 9:01am train out of Paris to BRUSSELS. It was a bullet train, which was pretty sweet. It goes like 200 mph. I slept the 1h20 min to Brussels, and when we got there, it was freezing. Even colder than in Paris, like 40 degrees Fahrenheit. After a couple of false starts and misdirections, we found our way over to a neighborhood filled with antiques that my mom wanted to see. Then we found a church that we THOUGHT was the main church. It wasn't -- instead of Eglise Sablon it was Notre Dame de la Chapelle. Too many churches. We finally found Eglise Sablon, which was kind of cool.

But even better was that behind it was the place that is known for having the best hot chocolate in Brussels. We enjoyed some hot chocolate, coffee, quiche, sole, and pomme frites for brunch.

And then we had some more chocolates at a chocolatier. And then some macarons at another chocolatier.

We walked around some more, back through the antique neighborhood and just around. Found some cool graffiti, and the Jewish museum, etc.

Eventually we made our way over to this brewery museum...but of course it was closed! Boo. So we decided to walk to Grande Place, the main historic square in Brussels. On our way we found Mannekin Pis (peeing boy), a hilarious Brussels landmark. He wears costumes from different nations and cultures a couple times a week, and he's been there since like 1600something.

We also found a store called 250 beers, where we stocked up on Trappist beers (to compare to the ones that Shuli and my mom are driving three hours to get from an Abbey in Belgium because it's known as the best beer in the world), beers from the brewery that was closed, and a couple other Belgian specialties.

Then we found Grande Place, which was pretty cool. It's basically a huge historic square surrounded by old gilded buildings. Then we stopped in for a beer, at a place that had a stuffed horse. Awesome. I had Duvel, which was like the classic Belgian beer. It was good.

After warming up, we killed some time by eating a Belgian waffle. Check.

Then we took the metro to Atomium, which is this awesome landmark that was built for the Brussels World Fair. It's a hydrogen atom or something like that, and you can see the city reflected in the balls. We should up at kind of an awkward time, because tours stopped at 6pm (which is when we got there) but the restaurant at the top where we had dinner reservation didn't open till 7:30pm. So we found this like shopping mall/restaurant area nearby and stopped for another Belgian beer. I had Leffe Radieuse, which I really liked. Belgian beer is also like double percent alcohol, which is great, haha. After we killed some time, we went up to the top of the Atomium for our dinner.

We were kind of worried because we had to make a 9:37pm train. It was the last train out of Brussels before the strikes shut down all the trains, so it would have sucked to missed it. We talked to the waiters, and they said if we got two courses instead of three that it would be ok. That was totally fine, because we'd basically been eating and drinking all day anyways. They started off with a gazpacho, and then we got ravioli and mushroom and cheese dishes. Our entrees were salmon tartar, veal, and chicken pot pie.

It was supposed to be this molecular gastronomy restaurant, but clearly was not. It was delicious nonetheless, and you could see the whole city from the top. Then we took a cab to the train station, and made our train home safe and sound.