6/15/15
Brussels, Belgium → Antwerp, Belgium

I awoke to a rumbling earthquake, my stomach serving as the epicenter. Unfortunately, we didn’t leave ourselves ample time to eat. We had to be home by 11:00 a.m. to finish packing and catch a ride to Jacques Brel metro station to meet Sofie, our BlaBlaCar driver chauffeuring us to Antwerp.

Ash and I were on much better terms today as we set out on a mission to eat waffles from the famous orange food trucks we had heard so much about. Thinking about our next meal is a common excitement for us both. We can usually get through dark times fairly quickly when there is food at the end of the tunnel.

It took thirty minutes of walking before we spotted an orange truck. Our stomachs were furious at this point. You can imagine my disappointment when we discovered that the Brussels city trash trucks were also orange.

As we walked, both of us becoming “hangry,” I had my first real What the hell are we doing here? moment. We were jobless, homeless, with a finite money supply, in a country far from home. Like in the movies, it is the true paradox of love and hate. I loved where we were at this very moment. I loved the girl I was sharing this journey with, and I loved using my time the way I wanted rather than being told how to spend my forty-hour workweek. On the other hand, I hated the constant concern we both had that we’d made the wrong decision, and I was troubled that we didn’t have jobs lined up for when we got home.

The fact that I was concerned about having a job four months from now was the epitome of my problems. It wasn’t that I wanted to save the earth in four months or research life-changing medicine. No, I wanted a j-o-b so that I could make money and feel better about how everyone saw me. I was more concerned with my Facebook status and the public view of me than doing what truly made me happy. I suppose admitting the problem is the first step to recovery, right?

Our search for the orange trucks proved unsuccessful, so we settled for a waffle shop in the Grand-Place. This was like going to New York City and only finding pizza in Times Square. The waffles were essentially doughnuts.

We finally made it home with almost no time to spare. We could not afford to miss our BlaBlaCar ride, but we couldn’t get a Wi-Fi signal, which meant there was no way to order an Uber to meet Sofie.

Ash finally found a signal as she sat on my shoulders and stretched toward the router. We sat in silence, our backpacks weighing us down, and waited impatiently for the Uber to arrive.

Unfortunately, we once again failed the test of keeping our cool in tense situations. With all the chaos and stress of missing our ride, we naturally took it out on each other. We had no way else to vent, and ended up yelling at each another, making the lack of Wi-Fi the other person’s fault rather than a simple misfortune.

On-screen, our driver looked like he was playing Pac-Man and we were the colored ghosts. Right when he would get close to us, he would then suddenly turn the wrong way. He eventually made it and stopped the car in the middle of the road, laughing as he proclaimed we were his first ride ever. Of course we were.

I read him the directions to the train station from my phone as fast as I could, but he remained parked in the middle of the road, fumbling with his app, a symphony of honks blaring behind us. He missed the first turn he was supposed to make. We’re screwed, I thought as we passed multiple orange waffle trucks.

We eventually reached the station, and we sprung out of the car as it rolled to a stop. We urgently looked for Sofie’s green Nissan Note. We had been told to meet her at the station, but that point became moot once we arrived: the station took up an entire city block. “Slow down!” Ash yelled twenty yards behind me as I darted from street to street. I was a bit more nimble with my backpack, as it was about a quarter of my weight while Ash’s was nearly half of hers.

As I turned one last corner and was ready to give up, I saw the Note heading away from us. I ran into the middle of the street one hundred yards behind the car and waved my hands frantically in an attempt to make a scene in her rearview mirror. It worked. I saw the bright-red lights of her brakes and watched the Note pull into a parking spot, hazards on.

“Sophie?” I asked in between breaths when I got to the car.

“Hello!” she replied. “I was just about to leave!”

We’d made it.

Sophie turned out to be a sweet Belgian woman in her midforties who worked as a nutritionist, but not in a traditional sense. Her role revolved around creating the information infrastructure for wellness coaches who worked with large corporations.

I wished instead of What do you do? as an icebreaker, people asked, So what makes you the most happy? I would imagine the people who’d figured out life would have the same answer for both. Sophie dropped us off in the middle of downtown Antwerp, and we paid her ten euros for the ride.

The city of Antwerp was gorgeous. It had that small-town feel like everyone might know each other personally; at the same time, it boasted big-city perks like great stores and restaurants. Ash excitedly told me about all the shops in the promenade she would be exploring. I, of course, mapped out all the closest bars.

Our next Airbnb was in the center of the city. How could we afford this, you ask? We were sharing the space with the owner, Lieze, and her boyfriend. We chose to stay at their loft apartment because it would give us our own private porch overlooking the city, and it was only forty-five dollars a night.

The Airbnbs we looked for in each location had the following criteria: our own place (we didn’t want to share the space with anyone unless we had to), air conditioning (this is self-explanatory: European summers are hot, yet Europeans abhor the thought of AC), and Wi-Fi (we needed this to plan our trip, communicate with hosts/drivers, and shamelessly access social media). Most important, we wanted to be in a walkable area of the city to explore its best parts. If there was nothing available with our criteria in a desired part of town, we budged on our own space.

Lieze had left us a key in a lockbox outside. We took the elevator to the third floor, which opened up into the apartment, encompassing an entire floor. There was plenty of room to spread out. We dropped off our packs and headed out to indulge in more local beers.

It is truly amazing how people can create such a great-tasting beer with an alcohol percentage this high. Sure, American beer companies make beers with 9 percent, but most end their names with Ice or Platinum and taste like piss-infused rocket fuel.

Ash headed off to shop. She left me at the outdoor bar.

I ordered my fourth beer of the afternoon, and sat people watching, alone, alongside a table in the promenade. I saw a young girl hopscotching on an imaginary hopscotch course. She got mad at herself when she messed up. There were people all around, yet I was completely zoned out due to the language barrier. That is the best part of people watching in a foreign country: you can watch uninterrupted because you aren’t drawn into other people’s conversations. The unintelligible chatter merely serves as white noise as you scan the crowds, reveling in the day without interruption, almost like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.

When Ash returned, we decided to go meet our Airbnb hosts before my tipsy demeanor morphed into full-fledged drunk.

Lieze and her boyfriend, it turned out, were video game enthusiasts. They also had a love for art. We chatted for about fifteen minutes with the young couple before heading back into the village to barhop at the local pubs.

We sampled Orval, Kriek Boan, Maes, Affligem, Westmalle, and De Koninck, a beer brewed in Antwerp. Suzie, a lovely sixty-year-old bartender, told us they only get the Orval supply every couple of weeks because it’s made in small batches. Sometimes it even takes a month or two before it arrives. Orval refuses to increase production to meet the demand and risk losing quality. (To an American, this business practice seemed extremely respectable but highly questionable.)

We ended our evening eating dinner across the street from our Airbnb at a place with a little bulldog on the sign. It turned out that the bulldog, whose name was Billie, belonged to the owner. Billie strolled around the restaurant like he owned the place. We drank complimentary beers and chatted with the owner about our travels thus far. A fellow traveler himself, he shared some off-the-beaten-path anecdotes and recommendations for Thailand, but made us promise him we would visit an island called Ko Tao. We happily obliged.

We stumbled home afterward, our tummies full from what had to have been five strong beers each. We attempted to unlock the door of our place for twenty minutes, but we just couldn’t seem to get it to open. Lieze and her boyfriend eventually let us in. We all laughed at ourselves in the hallway. They told us it wasn’t the key that wasn’t working. We were pushing the door instead of pulling.