Arriving in Brussels

 You can see that there are too many Daves on this trip. For clarity sake, I'll regress to Junior High and refer to Dave Scroggie as Scroggs, and Dave Hendrickson as Dave (What? It's my blog!)

We had a delay out of Amsterdam at about 40 minutes, but since it was about a 30 minute flight, no problem. We got to the hotel in Brussels by 5 pm. We met our Viking rep for a brief introduction to Brussels, and headed off to dinner. There is a lively City Central area where we found this restaurant:

Saturday morning we started our walking tour with our guide, Jeanine. See the next post! In the meantime, Belgium is about fries and waffles. (Do NOT call them French Fries…these are Belgian fries!) What makes Belgian fries different? They are fried once on low-temperature, then fried again right before serving at high temperature. This makes them soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. Then, they put mayonnaise on them (ketchup for Americans)!

Oh, and CHOCOLATE!

There are over 2000 chocolatiers in Belgium, producing over 172,000 tons annually, much of it exported around the world. I’ll go on record as admitting that I’m doing my part as a consumer. We didn’t visit all 2000 but we did see these, and more.  

Neuhaus, below, is credited with creating the praline. They were a pharmacy and a client couldn’t get her child to take the medicine. Neuhaus wrapped it in chocolate and voila’. They invented the first hard chocolate shell, enabling chocolatiers to develop chocolates with a smooth creamy filling (my favorite so, #grateful). Today, Neuhaus is only a chocolatier. 

And this. No explanation necessary. 

And of course:

Stuff from the tour will be next!