Brussels - And All That Jazz

Friday, May 19th, we got up for the included breakfast, which was surprisingly quite nice, got cleaned up, packed and checked out before 11. It was a short walk to the bahnhoff and since the Deutsche Post was right across the street, we used the opportunity to mail postcards. Again, the guy behind the window was super friendly, and even stamped all 35 of our postcards for us. We could hardly believe it. He was very interested in our travels, noting from our postcards that we had even been to Munich, which we assumed must have been his home. With that taken care of, we caught a train to Koln, where we had about 45 minutes to kill before our connecting train would arrive, and so we ventured out to our favorite bakery, the "Merzenich", and loaded up on guilt-laden tastinesses for the 2 1/2 hour trip to Brussels. Surviving a brutal wind, and some intermittant drizzle, we made our way back from the bakery, past the infamous Dom, through crowds of screaming kids obviously on school trips, to the train station and with little delay, boarded the ICE train to Brussels, after quickly verifying with another friendly DB agent that with our Eurail pass, we were not required to reserve a seat first. Oh, and how can we ever forget the DB agent behind the desk next to ours, who had a hairdo like King Louis the ?-teenth. With almost zero discretion, the guy standing behind me in the que creeped around a pillar, only partially concealing himself to snap a picture of the particularly interesting DB agent and his wild hair. We found the train platform and it is was a seemingly very quick ride into Brussels. We gambled and got off the train at the "midi" station, but it turned out, we needed to get off at Nord. So, we got back on the train, and headed back to the station that was much closer to our hotel. Eventually, we got situated, and pushed through the fierce winds to the Hampshire Hotel. We checked in, dropped off our bags, and walked back into the city center. I didn't know what to expect, but once there, I found the city center to be beautiful! The Grand Place was beautiful, and the surrounding streets were an entertaining mix of smoke shops, beer shops, restaurants, souvenir stores, etc. I was wondering if we could see some jazz, since it was Friday night and all, and it turns out that it was the Jazz Marathon weekend in Brussels, and all over the city, there was live, free, jazz. We watched a jazz band in the Grand Place, and they were great. We stuck around for the second band, and though they were musically talented, there songs were awful, and we left midway through the 3rd song. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a brewery bar, and shared a wit bier, and a palette of the 3 biers they brewed there: wit, amber, and a blond. The wit and the amber were watery and tasteless, but the blond was okay. Then we walked back to the hotel and pretty much called it a night.