A visit, a vacation, and vivacious vespertine vizards (part 10 of ?)

DAY 4 - CONT
The hostel we're staying at has a map/guide to the city which mentions
a type of beer I'd never heard of - gueze, apparently only found
locally. We head to a place that has it on tap. The menu refers to
this type of beer as "self-fermenting." I don't know what that's
supposed to mean, but the beer is yummy - though it doesn't taste like
any beer I've had before. It's so sour, it tastes more like lemonade.
They do a cherry kind that is even better.

DAY 5 -COFFEE, CATHEDRALS, PALACES AND PARKING
We start the morning finally getting that coffee we've been talking
about all trip. It's instant, a freebie in our hostel's lobby. Then we
go and get the third thing everyone thinks of when they think of
Belgium - waffles! This would not even have occured to me were it not
for the frozen waffles they sell at the front desk to shut up the
wise-asses. We go to a place in the galleries that does them up right
- I get mine with ice cream and chocolate sauce, Pat gets a cherry
concoction. We head out and hit the highlights - the flea market, the
palace of justice (which does not disappoint. Seems like the sort of
place that would be impressive, right? Here it is. Paris, not so
much.), the museum area (though the only one we're ardently interested
in going in, which has underground 15th century ruins, is closed), the
royal palace and gardens (pretty enough, but no Jardin du Luxembourg),
and St. Michael's Cathedral. Along our walk I notice that the city
planners have used the perverse strategy I hated so much in Atlanta of
giving one street many names, depending on which block you happen to
be on. We go down four different streets without once turning to get
to our next destination - a parking garage. Its view from 11 stories
up is recommended as one of the nicest in town, and it's free. We see
much of town, including in the distance the Atomium, which we didn't
visit (it's touted as Brussel's Eiffel Tower, and like the Tower it's
expensive to go up and not particularly close to anything else we were
interested in.