Belgium.....beer, chocolate and waffles. :)

I am back from my half term break in Belgium! It was such a fun trip and I took tons of pictures!!!

On Monday, I met up with Jess at the airport around 11 am! One of the LSAs from my school was kind enough to drive me to Heathrow and it only took about 25 minutes. We went through security and had time to have a few drinks before our flight to Brussels! We flew British Airways and it is probably the best airline ever. They actually serve you food and booze.... for free!!! Since we were on holiday we decided to have a drink and get caught up after having not seen each other for about a month! The flight was only 55 minutes and then we were in Brussels.

I was surprised at the amount of people who didn't speak English. I also had no idea that the two national languages were French and Dutch. Anyways, we made it to Brussels Central by train and then wandered around trying to find our hostel.... eventually we did!!! We checked in and had to make our own beds. At first I was skeptical about the whole hostel thing but by the end of the week I felt completely comfortable!

Our room!

We wandered up an adorable little street and found a place for dinner and beer! We had some yummy food and tried a whole range of beers.... mainly because we couldn't read Dutch or French and had no idea what anything meant... the whole trip was a kind of surprise! We did find our favourites though.... Hoegaarden!

Tuesday we spend exploring Brussels... which involved a lot of shopping! We went to the Grand Place and went in to a museam and wandering around the city central and shopping on "Monopoly Street" basically just a long street full with our favourite shops. For lunch we stopped and had our first Belgian Waffle... mine with chocolate and Jess got strawberry. We also stopped in a chocolate store and bought a lot of expensive chocolate and stroopwafels! We also went to Laduree... the macaroon shop I went to in Paris and bought some macaroons. We spent more on sweets than we did on our hostel Jess pointed out!!! We were all shopped out and had seen a lot of Brussels and then went back for dinner at the cutest place by our Hostel called Sol! We were pretty tired after dinner so we went to a little shop and bought some beer and relaxed at our hostel and had an early night for our big day in Brugge.

cutest little chocolate shop.

The Grand Place.

SO GOOD.

Wednesday we spent the day in Brugge... the cutest little town/city! It was on a canal and absolutely gorgeous. Except for the fact in POURED all day... but that didn't stop us. We wandered around and went into many little shops and then stopped for a lunch of... waffles! It was so good, I had one with Speculoos on it... a delicious Belgium caramel/peanut butter type paste! We then decided to take a canal tour of Brugge and we learnt a lot and saw another view of Brugge. We took tons of pictures. Then around 3 we decided to settle down in a cafe and have a bottle of wine and cheese. Then we went to another bar and relaxed there as well! We ended up not making it back to the train station until 10 pm and we had left Brussels at 10 am! We made a friend on the train who told us some more interesting bits of Belgium. Now for picture overload.

Morning walk.

it was magical!

Good night Brugge.

The final day was spent in Ghent. Ghent was before Brugge on the train line and only took us about 30 minutes to get there, as opposed to Brugge which took about 1 hour. Ghent was a mixture between Brussels and Brugge we thought... it was right on a canal and had the cute Belgium buildings but was a pretty big city. We walked around, ate lunch right on the canal and took a horse tour around the city! This was a nice way to see Ghent as we were so tired and exhausted from the day before. We didn't spend all day in Ghent, we stayed till around 3 pm.

More canals!!

On top of a castle we went in!

On our horse tour.

That is our Belgium trip summed up into a blog post! It was a nice getaway and much needed. All the hard work at school was worth it to get away for a week!!! Overall, my favourite day was the day we went into Brugge. It was hard to pick though because each day was very different.