Belgium: five days of wining and dining

We've been planning and saving for this adventure for months, and Belgium didn't disappoint.

Brussels is less than 2 hours from London on Eurostar. We love the train to Europe. It's faster, it's greener, the queues are shorter, the station is easier to get to than the airport, and there's no chance of your bag accidentally being sent to Belfast instead of Belgium. (Don't laugh, it happened to our friend Heather, who joined us for the Brussels bit - she swears that next time, she'll go by train too!)

On arrival, we scooted up to Bruges, trudged through the rain to our wee hotel and went in search of lunch. We found it.

Mussels gratin, snails in garlic butter, beefsteak with frites (and mayo, of course!), rabbit stew, and the lushest vanilla icecream. Okay, it was tourist quality food, but at a tenner each for a 3 course lunch (that's 14 euros, or $A22), it's value in almost any country.

And that was just the beginning - we followed up in the days to come with olliebollen, flemish stew, witlof tart, cured sausage with mustard, flemish asparagus, steak tartare (called 'cannibale'), frites and more fritjes (always with mayonnaise), croque monseiur, croque madame (croque monsieur avec un oeuff), waffles with chocolate sauce and cream, grapes dipped in toffee, daily hot chocolates, lashings of gluhwein and 21 different kinds of beer. The highlight has to have been proper moules mariniere, served in a massive black cast iron pot, with a lid deep enough to act as a bowl for the cast off mussel shells.

And everywhere, in every cafe, for every meal, gorgeous old-world surroundings, strange-yet-familiar, making me realise that Melbourne is not an English city. It's a European city. High ceilings, centuries-old decor that's so much less gaudy than the Victorian pubs of London. Mirrors and lights everywhere, indoors and along the streets, give the illusion of space and make the night less dark. Outdoors, even streetlights sit lower, brightening the street rather than sitting high above rooftops like so many insipid little suns in foggy gloom.

Some places were genuinely familiar. It wouldn't have been Brussels without scouring the streets around the Bourse until we found the brass duck embedded in the flagstones marking the narrow alley to a la Becasse. Their specialty is Lambic Douze, the first beer I ever liked and the best I ever had, servied with sausiccon sec (dried sausage), roughly sliced at the bar and served with a massive glop of mustard. A day or so later we shared a final brew at A La Mort Subite (the Sudden Death) - ironically, or perhaps not, always a favourite of the Finn's. But the place we all kept going back to was Le Cirio, where the house specialty drink is a half-and-half: half white wine and half champagne (and a steal, at 3 euros, that's £2!). I've been wondering where this place is ever since Francis first took me there twelve and a half years ago... (oh my, I'm getting old).

Like the first time, and the last time, I was there, I knew I could live in this place.

It's gonna be so hard to go back to English food after this.

(If you want to know more about Belgian food and why it's so damn good, this article is brilliant)