Tuesday, August 19, 2014

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium!


Last Tuesday we drove across to Brussels for a few days. It was our 3rd wedding anniversary - can you believe that? We chose Brussels simply because it has great restaurants and German food just ain’t interesting.

You’d’ve thought they would have moved on a bit by now, but pork cabbage and potatoes still reigns supreme. We can buy a fabulous variety of food in the markets here, obviously the restaurants don’t frequent them. Tonight for example we are having my wild boar stew – yum!

Anyway I’ve digressed again moaning about German food. We ate at an authentic Sicilian restaurant for our celebration. God love the Italians, their ‘cucina provera’ is always interesting and tasty. We devoured a delicious meal and fabulous wine, of course.
 
Brussel's main square
Brussels has become a real tourist mecca, and we had to dodge loads of tour groups. We‘ve no idea why so many come here, it’s not that interesting, not that we didn’t have fun, but I wouldn’t go out of my way on a 2 or 3 week tour of Europe. Paris, Rome Brussels???

We stopped overnight in Maastricht on the way home and had a wonderful Indonesian meal. Next day we found a winery – of course! I think there’s only one hill in the Netherlands and this was it. It’s a very marginal area to grow wine grapes and what we tasted was a bit flat. Won’t be rushing to buy more.
 
Maastricht winery
We had lunch in Aachen  - a very appealing mediaeval town, then back to Bonn.
 
Aachen Rathaus

Aachen Cathedral

We’ve done some re-arranging and reshuffling in Boris, creating more space – not sure how we keep managing this, but we do. He’ll be in fine working order when we leave here mid-October.
 
Lawrence doing some spring cleaning.