I am going to start off by ranting about our hotel. If you don’t want to read about it and want to see what we actually did for the day, please skip ahead 🙂

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Hotel Villa Royale

When I booked this hotel on booking.com, it had a rating of 7.3/10 (which was close to the rating of our Copenhagen accommodation at 7.8/10). Nothing was out of the norm when we arrived at the hotel and checked in, except I noticed the chair next to the reception was quite old and damaged, but I didn’t think much of it.

Since we walked from the train station with our luggage, we wanted to turn on the AC but couldn’t figure out how the controls worked. So we called reception but they told us that they have no AC (then what are the controls for?!) We couldn’t open the window because it was locked. The hotel staff had to come unlock the windows for us.

We slowly noticed most of the room facilities were in poor condition. The toilet seat and toilet paper holder were falling apart, the lamps in the room don’t turn on, the fridge was barely cold, the beds creaked when we made the slightest move, the mattress was so soft that my back hurts from sleeping on it, the fabric on the headboard was damaged and the hairdryer turns off by itself every minute. On the night before we left, the window was literally falling apart and falling inwards into the room and even our main room light went out. The only thing that kept our room lit was a small reading light.

As terrible as the room facilities were, I can tell that the staff were trying their best to be helpful and I feel bad for them to have to work at a run down hotel like this. I honestly don’t understand how there are good reviews for this place (unless I was just really unlucky and got a bad room). If the only thing you care about is having a roof over your head and something to sleep on, then go ahead and book this place, otherwise, I would NOT recommend this hotel to anyone.

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The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula

After we settled down at our hotel, we headed out to the Royal Gallery of Saint Hubert and we happened to walk by this cathedral on the way.

Royal Gallery of Saint Hubert

This place is known for shopping but I didn’t do much shopping here except for chocolates. My favorite stores were Neuhaus and Leonidas. Can’t leave Belgium without buying some chocolate!

Maison Dandoy

I heard this place was famous for their Belgian waffles so I’ve gotta give it a try. We got the Brussels waffle with powered sugar (I forgot what topping we got).

They also have lots of cookies to choose from including their famous speculoos.

The Grand Place

We made our way to The Grand Place and I was so overwhelmed by all the opulent architecture. It was pretty much impossible to capture all of it at once unless I had a 360 camera.

Lobster House

We randomly found this restaurant for dinner because the restaurant we originally wanted to go to was too busy and we kept being ignored by the staff.

The staff and the service here were great. The food weren’t bad but just not as flavorful as we thought.