Grew Up A Little

So yesterday and tonight I went out wandering because I think that is the best way to get to know a city, if you follow a guidebook you really only get to see what they tell you to see and I want to see everything, even if it isn’t all that interesting or the safest area in the world, but anyway as I was out wandering it got to be around dinner time. Both nights right as I was getting pretty hungry I happened on a restaurant that looked good; looked good to me implies that it has a cool name, it looks open, there are a decent amount of people in there already eating and on the menu posted outside there are at least two vegetarian options. Yesterday, it was Les Chapeliers on Rue des Chapeliers just off the Grand Place. I ordered a vegetable pannelloni or something like that. It was basically shredded carrots and cabbage (I’m not actually sure if it was cabbage, it could have been endives which seem to be very popular here) wrapped in pasta and drenched in the most amazing cheese sauce I’ve ever had. It was about 5/6^th cheese and the rest was tomato, absolutely fabulous. I’m not the biggest fan of cabbage but with that much cheese just about anything will taste good. And I had a half liter of, I think it was the blond Maes, but I’m not sure. I asked the waiter for a recommendation and he said something really fast so I’m not sure. It’s funny generally when I have beer and food together the tastes just completely don’t mix. Usually, the beer comes out first so I have the taste of it without the food flavor interfering. Then the food comes out and the mixture of flavors just clashes for me. This time, the flavors clashed but it wasn’t in a bad way. I’ve yet to have a bad experience with Belgian beer (and on that note: Kriek. Remember that word. Seriously. For people who saw me at any point last fall around Thanksgiving you may remember how I raved about Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Ale. This is similar in that the flavor is so unique but it’s like fifty times better. It’s a cherry beer apparently. Framboise is the raspberry equivalent. I don’t think it’s as good, it’s decent but not omg, orgasmically amazing like Kriek).

Tonight I was out wandering in the St. Gery/St. Catherine area which is kind of northwest of la Bourse (the old stock exchange building) and I stumbled upon this Thai restaurant, Luna de miel (Honey Moon). I’m not sure what street it’s on but it’s pretty much right across the street from la Bourse. I got just your basic Pad Thai. It was fabulous, spicy as hell but superb. It was a huge plate, not so much that I felt sick afterward but enough to really fill me up and I didn’t have a very big lunch and it was only 10 Euro! And the atmosphere was wonderful in a muted kind of way. It was decorated in deep oranges and reds with pods of tree trunks clumped together that sprouted 2x4s as branches. I don’t how to describe those but it was really neat. I’d have to draw a picture or something.

The thing that was nice about these two nights was that what I ended up ordering was exactly what I wanted but I didn’t even know what I was craving. Yesterday, after work I went out for a walk southeast toward the center of the city and Avenue Louise (which on first impression is really overrated) and ended up getting ridiculously lost. I think I left my hostel around 4:30pm. Around 5:10 I decided that I wanted to head back. I still hadn’t found a permanent place to stay instead of hostel hopping and that was really frustrating me so much so that I couldn’t enjoy just being out exploring a new place. I planned to go back to my hostel and do some more emailing/calling/sleuth work until I came up with something so I turned down a street that I thought would get me back. Apparently I’d walked a LOT further than I thought: I’d walked almost to the Shuman area (I take the metro to work; it’s about a 14 minute ride with six stops before I get off. Shuman is the stop before mine, so I’m guessing it’s a good two miles away from my hostel at least). I hadn’t walked in a straight line, anything but in fact so I’m guessing after I decided to turn back I ended up walking about 4 miles. It was starting to get dark, I was in an area I’d never walked around, I didn’t recognize any of the street names so I had no idea where I was or even which way to go, I was tired and hungry and just upset with the whole not having a place to live situation. I just wanted a place to sit down, have a good drink and good heavy food. I ended up finding it right around the corner from my hostel. Which was nice because, lightweight that I have become, I was a bit buzzed after that half-liter.

When I was walking down the Mont des Arts I couldn’t help thinking about this whole situation. They say that it’s on trips like these that you really learn about yourself, your strengths and weakness, who you are and grow immensely as a person. Last night, I felt like this trip was too much for me. I just couldn’t deal with it, I wasn’t ready for everything that I have had to deal with. I felt like an utter failure because it felt like nothing was going right. Generally, up to this point in my life, I haven’t worried about much of anything all that much. I’ve tried not to plan too far in advance because the way I see it you never know what is going to change in the future and you can’t plan for everything so why worry. And generally, things have fallen into place for me. Not worrying about anything worked. Things just went together without much help from me and I didn’t have the added stress of worrying about whether or not they would. I’m coming to realize on this trip that life doesn’t always work out so nicely, that sometimes you need to have a plan and then a back-up plan as well for when things don’t work out so well.