City Walkin’ in the BRU

Brussels is the second city in which I have utilised the City Walks app.  It is a free app that I came across a little over a year ago as I was preparing for my trip to Accra, Ghana.  I love to explore cities by walking, and City Walks is a tool that I have now used as well in Brussels.  I think at the time there were only two walking tours available for Accra, but they were both excellent.  There are no less than 19 walking tours for Brussels.  Today I went to four of the locations on the Chocolate Shops tour and four locations on the Shopping in Brussels tour.  (Can you identify my priorities while here?)  However, Brussels is not an enormous city and many of the sites are very close together.  I just noticed that I inadvertently hit some of the sites on some of the other tours.

City Walks in a free app, and most of the walks come as both a free and a paid version.  I recommend that one not be cheap and pay the $3.00-$5.00 for the upgrades because the added features save you time and are more informative about the locations you’ll see.  Like any other tours, there are sites along the City Walks tours that I did not find interesting.  This kind of sucks to find out after walking the kilometers it sometimes takes to get from one site to another, but it’s part of the fun and adventure, and the additional sites one gets to take in and enjoy along the way kind of make it worth the trouble.  

Two notable locations I visited today on the waking tours were Mary’s Chocolatier on Royal Street and Dandoy biscuiterie on Boterstraat.  Both of these have several outlets across the city, but I got the impression that these location on the tour were the original or oldest current locations.

Mary’s chocolates were beautiful and beautifully delicious, and I had to take a box away with me.

Many of the other chocolate shops on the tours (e.g. Neuhaus) did not have the uniqueness of Mary’s; they were like cookie-cutter shops and lacked personality.

Dandoy was like an antique gallery filled with the delicious aroma of speculoos.  Speculoos reminds me of the spiced cookies from my childhood that the Piggly Wiggle only sold during the Christmas season.  Considering the idea of Santa Claus in the US came via the Dutch, I suspect this Chrismas cookie tradition did too and my childhood spiced cookies are a cousin to speculoos.

I look forward to sharing the speculoos from Dandoy’s over a hot cup of tea this evening.