Day 1-2: January 19-20, 2018 - Planes, Trains, and Waffles

Our flight on the 19th left at 11:30 in the morning. My parents took us up to the airport. I had my last Sodalicious for two weeks in the car. Sam had a lemon water (I questioned our friendship at that moment). When I asked my parents what they wanted me to bring them back, my dad requested brussels sprouts from Brussels. My bag got searched (are you shocked?) because of my baby powder. I just told the lady it is for all my chaffing needs. We flew to San Francisco first (why we had to fly west to fly east, I'll never know). We grabbed some food on our short layover. 

Our flight to London wasn't very full. I tried to find a row to myself but no luck. Sam and I at least had a row to ourselves though. I pretty much watched Luther and The Crown that I downloaded on Netflix the whole flight. There was an Asian movie on the plane screen called Let Me Eat Your Pancreas - what the heck? We had some lovely airplane food. It was like this Asian chicken. It was nasty and made me sick. I only got about an hour of sleep during the whole flight. The flight was like 9 or 10 hours. 

We landed in Heathrow and went through customs (the line was forever long). We caught the Piccadilly Line to St. Pancras Station. We past our old stomping ground South Ken. I really wanted to get off and go check it out but I just had to keep reminding myself we were going to come back. I did get to laugh at the tube stop Cockfosters because I'm a child. We got a sandwich at the grocery store at the train station (I had a little deja vu - it was the same little grocery store I had gone to back in 2012 with my sisters) and we went through security on the Eurostar. The Eurostar took a couple of hours to get to Brussels. 

Sam indulged me by taking stupid pictures like this. She's a good sport. 

We pretty much slept the whole time. Once we got to Brussels, we took the metro to the Sainte Catherine stop where our BnB was. While we were waiting for the metro, there was a protest going on and a bunch of military guys with huge guns - that's something you want to see on the metro. Our BnB was just down a little alley from the Sainte Catherine Cathedral. We met our host, Karina, and she let us into the house. She was super nice. It was a super cute place too. There was a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom downstairs with the bedroom upstairs. There was a creepy skylight thing that we were nervous to walk over. The bathroom was small but nice. We each took a quick shower to clean off 24 hours of travel and airplane on us. 

We headed out to explore the city a little bit. It was raining and pretty cold. We got a better look at the  Sainte Catherine Cathedral and walked over to the Grand Place. It was super cool. We stopped by an ATM to get some cash out to get a waffle. I got a caramel one, it was scrumptious. 

It was cold and we were tired so we went back to the BnB. We tried to stay awake as long as we could. Sammie entertained me with some dancing. We went to bed around 8:00 which was a mistake because we woke up around 2:00 in the morning for an hour or two. Gotta love the jet lag.