The Good Doctor rocks the main square in old Brussels.
The GD and I wove down the cobble-stone streets to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where our hotel had booked us reservations. We were early, so we popped into a hotel bar just up the road. We were the only ones there and had a great chat with the extremely friendly (multilingual) bartender. When we asked what was good to drink, he handed me a very fruity drink and said, "The ladies like this one." I explained that I like beer, despite being a "lady." After this initial misunderstanding, he was very eager to offer us Belgium's finest, or you know, strongest.
A bit buzzed, we made our way back down the road to the restaurant and squeezed inside. We didn't have to wait long for our table, which was fortunate because there wasn't really anywhere to stand except between two tables of people already enjoying their meals. We sat down, redeemed out champagne vouchers, (thanks Martin's Brugge!), and both settled on the beef stew. Now when they say beef stew, they mean beef stew. No veggies, no nonsense, just beef. It was delicious and served with hot applesauce and fresh fries. That was not a typo, fries are Belgian, not French, and a nice waiter literally carried around a pot of bubbling oil from which he extracted the hot fries directly and placed them on our plates. I took seconds on the fries even though there was no way I could finish my first round, let alone the beef stew, just because they were so good hot. And that was the culinary highlight of Belgium.
We missed our waffle window. I thought about getting one from a street vendor, but we really wanted fresh waffles, not sat-out-all-morning waffles; we wanted the experience Belgium through waffles, as waffles, by waffles. We waited too long.
Canals are funny! I am chilly!
It was Sunday afternoon. Trains run every hour two minutes before the hour to Amsterdam, but we were aiming for the 13:58 train. We spent the morning exploring the canals, walking through a flea market (smaller than the awesome one we had seen in Brussels) and being too full from breakfast to stop for waffles. We'll get some on the way out of town, we thought. No problem, we thought. There's loads of restaurants with waffles, we thought.
We grabbed our bags from the hotel and headed to a square with several promising restaurants, and settled on the first one that listed waffles on their menu. Rosy-cheeked from our walk, heads filled with visions of days in Amsterdam ahead, we walked in, anxious only to have a real, Belgian waffle before moving on to our next destination. Then everything fell apart.
A woman came to take our drink order (tea), but wouldn't take the waffle order. Around seven minutes later I finally wrangled in a waiter who had walked past us at least five times and made the long-anticipated request: one Belgian waffle with lemon, please. Easy enough, right?
At this point it is about ten past one. Our train is in 48 minutes. The station is a good fifteen to twenty minute walk from where we are. We think, It'll be close, but we'll make it. How long can two cups of tea and one waffle take? Too long. Too long. After (I kid you not) 15 minutes, they had not even brought out our tea. Mind you, there were maybe three to five other people in the restaurant, and we had ordered the tea nearly ten minutes before the waffle. It was nearing half past, and we started to wonder weather we were going to have to leave without eating. The GD stopped our waiter and explained that we had a train to catch, and Is there any way to get our tea now? and possibly know weather our waffle has been started? thanks.
The waiter was not impressed. We should have told him at the get-go that we had a train to catch, then they would have made our waffle first. Never mind the fact that when we had arrived 40 minutes earlier, we hadn't thought time would be an issue. He berated me a couple of more times, and I began the transformation into ugly tourist. Where was the customer service? The Belgian charm? The man brought out our tea immediately --two cups of hot water and two tea bags, how hard was that?-- and said he would check on our waffle. We sipped our tea and watched as the precious minutes left between us and the train station slipped away. We were about to leave when another waitress plopped the waffle down in front of us. My building anger and frustration was channeled into my knife as I cut off a bite. I put it in my mouth. It was mediocre at best and-- wait, is this possible?-- still frozen in the center!
I lost it. Well, lost it as much as I lose it in a public place in a foreign country. A waitress was passing me, speaking to another woman in another language. "Is this waffle from the freezer?" I demanded. She looked confused, then said, "Um..."
"It's still frozen in the middle," I retorted. She wasn't even our waitress, but I was pissed. I had completely interrupted her while she was dealing with another customer, I was raising my voice in English, and I may as well have been wearing a shirt that said American asshole, but I didn't care. We were so out of there. We were already grabbing our bags, desperate to pay and try to make our train. There was some confusion with the bill and I left fuming before I hit someone, but the GD said they didn't charge us for the waffle. Damn right, they didn't.
We hauled ass toward the station. I had only looked at the map once before "lunch" to plan our route, but it was not the moment to be slowed down by such cumbersome things as directions. I was peeling through the crowds with my rolling suitcase, the GD a slightly more relaxed ten paces behind me. We got to the main road the station was on with about seven minutes to go, and I suddenly realized we were very much on the wrong side. We were on the same side of the road as the station, but it split in such a way that we would have to veer away from our destination or cross several lanes of traffic without a crosswalk. The GD reminded me that it wasn't worth running in front of a semi. I resignedly slowed my pace, stopped, waited to cross the street.
We had missed it. We were still minutes away and there was no way we were going to make it. I hated Belgium. I hated waffles. I still really wanted one, but I hated waffles and most of all frozen waffles. At our new, defeated pace, we rounded to the corner to the entrance of the station. As we crossed the threshold, the giant, official clock told us it was 13:55. Three minutes. My eyes locked with the GD's and we exchanged a look that said, Let's do this thing. We made a b-line for a ticket counter, miraculously line-free. "Two tickets to Amsterdam, please!" I said. My politeness had returned. "Sure," she said, as she took thirty painful seconds to collect our money and print the tickets.
The GD turned to me. "Now it might be worth it to run." We ran: to our platform, up the stairs, and into the first car with two empty, adjacent seats. I let out of a breath of relief as we sat down. Yes! We did it! Fuck you, Belgium, we're going to Amsterdam! And so we did.
good story!
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