Brugge Trip: Waffles and TV

It was evening and the kids were starting to get hungry. We're staying in our favorite type of hotel setting -- a little apartment-type of set up where we can all be together.  It is not easy to find a hotel room in Europe for more than two people.  We usually have to work hard to find two triples in a hotel.  But with a kitchen, we can take of dinner ourselves.

"Let's just go pick up a box of cereal and carton of milk or something. We don't need a full dinner," I said.  And so began David and my quest for a simple dinner. We got directions from the front desk for a grocery store, but couldn't find it (turns out we were distracted by the delicious aroma of a Belgian waffle stand and didn't notice the little supermarket across the street which ended up being closed anyway.) Our wandering took us to two mini-markets, but one didn't have any cereal and neither had cold milk. I was getting frustrated and suggested forcefully, "Let's just pick up some of those waffles on the way home." And that's just what we ended up doing. Over an hour of wandering around and we ended up back at the waffle stand.

The kids devoured the waffles and we all agreed these were the best waffles we had ever had. Belgian waffles are more substantial than regular waffles and have a crispy brown sugar-type of coating. No syrup needed.  They really didn't need all that powdered sugar either.

The knork or forfe we ate with.

The kid were very excited to see that we had a large flat screen TV in our living room. We watched a Flemish-dubbed episode of the Teletubbies (Becca, who dresses up all the time in the Lala halloween costume I made over 10 years ago had never seen the Teletubbies) and a Flemish-dubbed charming cartoon called Flapjack that reminded us a lot of Spongebob Squarepants but with more interesting animation.

One music channel advertised this vote-in show to decide on the quality of new videos.

There was also an all-English language station.  After waffles and putting Em and Bex to bed, Micaela, James, David and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting back and watching two straight hours of The Dog Whisperer.  It was such a treat as the only English-language channel we get at home is CNN International.  Sometimes MTV will broadcast shows in the original English, but we don't think the kids should be seeing mostly trashy MTV dating or reality shows.  This might have been the kids' favorite part of the day.