Eating our way through Europe

In order to spare an extremely long post and inundating you with pictures, I am breaking up my pictures and cities into multiple posts. I'm going in order of travels. I'm trying to include interesting facts I learned, cool architecture, and of course, food pictures!


Mons, Belgium
This is near where we stayed in Belgium (thanks Mike and Mitzi!).  We walked around Mons the day we flew in, and woke up early the next morning to go to Sunday Market.  It's a cute town with neat architecture bustling with people, at least on Saturday.  

Our first group picture in Belgium!  I know we're tiny but more pictures will come.

L to R: Kevin, myself, Matt, Sarah

This is the City Hall in Mons and in front of it is the Lucky Monkey.  If you rub his head with your left hand you get good luck for a year (and then Mitzi will make you sanitize your hand). 

Possibly the coolest door handle I've ever seen.  It was the handle and lock to City Hall.

While walking through Mons we came across our first taste of Belgian waffles.  Let's just say, it created a monster out of all of us. For the rest of our trip, every time we passed a waffle, we got one, they were amazing!! The one in the picture is Brussels-style, it's fluffy and has toppings, mine has chocolate and powdered sugar.  The other style, my favorite, is called Leige and it's denser, and more naturally sweet so it doesn't really need toppings (in my personal opinion).

Helin Pain, all night and day.  HA! This was a recurring joke on the trip.  Pain means bread in French; this was a bakery bread vending machine.  These are everywhere and it's fresh bread stocked from bakeries, and it's really cheap.

We did a 5K around this chateau but before we did we had a beer break. 

I ordered a raspberry beer, one of the 127 national beers of Belgium.  My beer was yummy because it didn't taste like beer, it tasted like sparkling raspberry juice.  Fun fact: it's illegal to serve a beer in Belgium without the corresponding glass; they must match.  If a restaurant has a beer in stock, it must have the matching glass to serve it.

 I thought this was really cool...these are shopping carts in front of the supermarket.  You have to put a euro in to get one and you get your euro back when you return it.  This system makes people return them!

Some neat facts I learned: Belgians are taxed on how wide their house is (the wider it is, the more taxes), almost no one has a front porch because if they sit outside they're more likely to sit out back, they park on one side of the street for the first half of the month and the other side for the second half, and they have weird road rules because they make you yield to the right at the most inopportune turns.