Hotel Arlequin Grand Place

I still have things I want to post about the recent trip to India, but I think I'm going to go ahead and get busy posting material from the three day jaunt through Belgium. While I knew I would enjoy my time in Belgium, I was really unprepared for how much I liked my time there. First off, the hotel. I arrived in Brussels around 7:00 a.m. on 3 July after my nine hour flight from Mumbai. Luckily, I decided to stay at the Hotel Arlequin Grand Place, which I had found on the net and which was also talked up in my Lonely Planet guide. I found a great deal at hotels.com for around $90 a night, which is, obviously, a pretty sweet deal for Europe. It was a little tricky to find initially, although everybody I met was remarkably friendly and spoke perfect English so I tracked it down pretty easily. You head out of the Centrale Gare, the central metro station (which is only two stops away from the airport), and just walk downhill for about three blocks. It ended up being about a block and a half from the Grand Place (more on that later). The guy at the front desk, who seemed to work there around the clock, was great - very friendly and full of wonderful suggestions. I was in room 702, which is on the top floor and had splendid view of downtown - and was about twenty feet away from the morning buffet (which was also very good - and had an even better view of downtown). Really, I could not have been happier with it.