Brussels!

Initially we expected Brussels to be a little blasé. This was based solely on our own ignorance of Belgium and the fact that we associate with Londoners who think that anything less than London is boring. But interestingly enough, Brussels is very cool. It's a big city with tons of history and a surprisingly extensive metro system, tons of restaurants, cafés and baguettes.

We left our flat very early Friday morning to catch our 6:10am Eurostar train from Waterloo Station. The first underground train comes through the Kingsbury tube stop at 5:25, that wouldn't get us there on time, so we wound up having to take a night bus at 4:30am. Very painful, and our route was a long an arduous bus ride that required some connections. I made the mistake of following the advise of our bus drivers instead of following our original plan. This left us at Trafalgar Square at 5:45am running around in circles trying to decide if we should run for Waterloo Station (15 min walk, 8 minute run), take the Tube or wait for the next bus. We opted for the tube, payed our fair then found out that the first train wasn't coming for 15 minutes (our Eurostar was leaving in 20) so we left, didn't have time to get our fair refunded and ran for a busy street. Laura realized our only chance was to get a cab (it's now 5:50). So we get a cab almost immediately, jump in the back and yell "Waterloo Station"!! The odd little man driving has on a fake mustache and sounds like Hercule Poirot. We ignored this and hoped that he would get us there on time. When we got there, we had £7 less in our pockets and 8 minutes to:
1) Find out how Eurostar ticketing works
2) Determine where Eurostar trains are
3) Get our boarding passes for our online reservation
4) go through their automated check-in process
5) clear security (full airport style x-ray and empty pockets metal detectors
6) find the train to Brussels, get on it.

That gave us a little over one minute per item. When we saw the line up to the automatic boarding pass printing machine I almost gave up. But then we noticed that there were four other unoccupied machines. The Brits are odd, in that they like to queue. It seems a national pass-time. I hate lineups so I went to the free one right beside everyone else, with an odd side-long glance at everyone else. Laura read off our reservation number, and I typed. Our passes printed out immediately and I let out a little "Yippee"! Then we got in line for security. This didn't go as well. By the time we got through we had 2 minutes until the scheduled departure time. The horse-shoes that Laura and I usually have hanging around our necks kicked in and there was a lady standing right in front of us pointing up an escalator saying "Brussels?". She checked our boarding passes and we ran up the escalator and into the first train we saw. We even had a minute or so to spare. We sat down in very big comfy chairs before we realized that we had assigned seating and that we were actually sitting in first class, so we found our seats and let our heart rates slow down. Such excitement.

The Eurostar is the train that joins downtown London with Brussels and Paris. It's great because it's very convenient and fast. We made it to downtown Brussels in 2 hours (Paris is 3 hours). It took us less than 20 minutes to cross the channel at close to 300km/h. The train has to go slow in the UK because they have yet to lay the tracks necessary for those kinds of speeds, but once we hit the continent we were off like a shot.

We went through France, then into Belgium. We knew when we passed international borders because we received text messages on our mobile phones saying "Welcome to France the phone/text rates here are ..." or "Welcome to Belgium ...". Without these text messages to our phones we would have no idea what country we were in as we're wizzing by at break-neck speeds.

Once we got into Brussels we realized that we were in trouble. We really didn't plan to much for this trip. That is to say, we didn't plan at all. We knew we were going to Brussels, we learned that Brussels was in Belgium, which was a good piece of knowledge to pick up, but that was the extent of what we knew about the city. I was able to pick up on a bit of the french, but the Flemish was just way out. We knew the address of our hotel but didn't know how to look up how to get there. We didn't even know that Brussels had a Metro. So we stood starring at a map of the city outside of the train station, when a nice energetic man in his sixties came up to us and asked us if we needed help (in French), we looked blankly at him and he repeated his question in English. We said, "Yes we need help".

I showed him the address of the hotel we were trying to get to, and he said "Follow me!" At this point I was a little skeptical, new city, new languages, 3 minutes off of the train, no idea where we were or if the part of the city we were in was dodgy. But he seemed... Belgian. So we followed. He spoke to us a mile a minute telling us about the Metro, and how it works, and how there is absolutely no need to pay *ever*. It seems to be an honour system, no gates, no ticket checkers, just go in and come out as needed. They seem to think of the Metro as a public service there. He brought us to the Metro, then got on the train with us and came to our stop. Then we went up to street level and he explained exactly where our hotel was and that we could take the Tram if we wanted or we could walk, it would be down on the left. Laura and I kept looking at each other realizing how much this guy just helped us out. We got out of him that he's retired and that people who are 65 and over can take public transit for free (legally) and he helps tourists out from time to time! How great is that? Our horse-shoes kicked in again. We would of hugged him but he was off quick as can be back to help out more tourists presumably.

We found our hotel without incident, our room was great and we ate baguettes and cheese from the local grocery store. The architecture in the old part of the city is amazing, they sure don't do anything small there.


The national languages are French and Flemish, and everything is truly bilingual. Everyone speaks English, better than most of us. Advertisements are 50% french and 50% English. And they have "Stop" signs, which seemed odd to me given that English isn't a national language.

Unbelievable the number of outdoor cafes and restaurants.


Not a lot of pubs here, and you don't see nearly as much rampant alcoholism as you see in London. Seems as though the pub culture isn't nearly as prevalent, despite the reputation Belgium has for great beers. And yes, we thought it only appropriate to sample some of said famous beer.


Their court-house is rather imposing.

One can imagine some poor sod going there for a court appearance. Its amazing what different societies spend a lot of time and effort on. Some cities have cathedrals, Brussels has their grand courthouse.

Brussels has a few famous claims to fame that I had heard about, waffles and the peeing boy.

Turns out that they had clothed the peeing boy, presumably to give him some respectability. But it was a rather futile endeavour given the fact that he's known as "Manneken Piss" and there are things like these all over the place.

Completely unprompted, I was told that hole in the picture cutout at crotch-level is "for your hand, and for nothing else!" Sounds like they have problems with bold picture takers.

Brussels is also the capitol of the EU, and N.A.T.O. headquarters is also here.

Laura and I snuk into the EU Parliament building (not open to the public) through imposing looking sliding white doors before our fear of Belgian jail prompted us to leave.

We visited a Belgian war museum.


Breakfasts consisted of baguettes and cheese, lunches where baguettes and cheese and tuna, and dinners were quite nice at a couple of restaurants.


Here are all of the pictures, some of them are pretty nice. It's a rather photogenic city and we recommend it to anyone. Very friendly, quite the active evening/nightlife, but very calm and it doesn't seem overly busy and loud. We vowed we'd be back.