Brussels (Europe at last!)

This week was a shocker.  Turns out Mark and family can’t have been completely over their tummy bug as they shared it with me.  Grant seemed to escape it and was a wonderful nurse, while I had to take three days off school.  And while I still don’t like that school much, I would still rather have been there than feel as sick as I did.  Luckily it was a short lived bug.

Friday saw Grant head off desperately early once more for his second day in Brussels.  I went back to work, and the last bell of the day saw me grabbing my bag and heading for home.  I had to get back to Woking, get my bag, and get to King’s Cross St. Pancras for the 18.05 Eurostar to Brussels.  It was a pretty frantic trip but I did get there in time.  I hadn’t had time to stop anywhere on the way for Euros though, so I found a currency place at the station.  Talk about a total rip-off!  We will make absolutely sure to get our Euros well in advance in the future.

The train journey was uneventful, but arriving alone at Brussels Midi was more than a little daunting.  The exit side of the station is pretty bare, all the signs are in French and Flemish only, and there appeared to be no staff about at all.  To be fair, it was just after 9pm.  We had checked on maps and looked for stations close to our accommodation that I could get a Metro train to, but in the end it was all just too unfamiliar.  I caught a taxi instead, and take my hat off to all those intrepid people who regularly travel alone.  I was most happy to reach our hotel and join up with my other half once more. 

Our hotel room was very small and, like almost every hotel we have stayed in this year, over-heated.  But it was comfortable and after such a long day we were ready for a good night’s sleep.  We didn’t do too badly in the end given the heating.

Saturday dawned very wet.  We had purchased hop-on, hop-off bus tickets via the internet and that seemed like a good first plan.  We could stay downstairs in the dry and look at the sights out the window.  But first things first; we went in search of breakfast.  There were a couple of nice-looking cafés close to our hotel – both of which were closed on the weekend.  Hungry and slightly pissed off, we went exploring in the rain.  We finally found an organic café (part of a chain) that both had good food and was open.  And we hadn’t got too terribly wet on the way.

Once fed and watered, we went in search of our bus.  We caught the Metro to one of the central stations, coincidentally close to the Irish pub Grant had found for us to watch the All Blacks at later, and found the kiosk to swap our booking notice for tickets very easily.  We had just missed a bus, so went walking to find Central Station which was a depot for the buses.  On the way we stumbled upon the Grand Place, and it truly was grand.  The buildings surrounding us were just beautiful, even through the rain.  We didn’t stop for long as it was still very wet, and soon made it to our bus.  We found that even the top deck was covered in poor weather so we went upstairs in order to get the best possible views.

These buses have two routes in Brussels, and we decided to take the red route first.  This took around the centre of Brussels (not the Grand Place; that’s pedestrians only), past the Parliament of Europe where the EU headquarters are, past some fabulous art deco architecture and the Abbaye de la Cambre.  You can’t actually see the Abbaye without getting off the bus as the grounds have such wonderful centuries-old trees.  Said grounds were lovely though.  Eventually, just as we were starting to get tired of peering out foggy windows, Grant recognised the area we had entered as being close to his course.  He had found a good café the previous Friday there so we got off the bus and went for lunch.

The café was nice, and had excellent sandwiches and quite nice coffee.  Even better, while we enjoyed our lunch, the rain stopped.  Instead of getting back on the bus we spent the afternoon exploring the streets of Brussels.  We even found the Grand Place again and got some better, less wet, photos.

Once it was getting close to 5pm, we made our way back to O’Reilly’s Bar and found a good seat in front of the big screen, ready for the All Blacks vs. Springboks game.  A group of South Africans was sitting at the next table, so it was going to be a fun evening.  When the Springboks scored the first try of the game off a forward pass, the response from Grant and from the South Africans was pretty much as you would expect.  It was all in good humour and set a hilarious tone for the rest of the game.  I am just glad we won, and won comprehensively, in the end!

We then went wandering in search of a proper dinner.  Earlier that day we had found ourselves in a little alleyway full of restaurants of all kinds and Grant had been given a card by a touter telling him if we came back there for dinner he could get a free drink.  This seemed like a good plan and we eventually found ourselves there again.  This time, the touting was really in your face and we were feeling pretty frustrated by the time we were seated.  We were even more frustrated when the ‘free drink’ turned out to be cheap horrible methode champagnoise rather than something you could choose.  We politely declined the drink.  On the up side, we shared a Chateaubriand for our meal, and while we would perhaps not have chosen French fries to have with it, the meat was absolutely delicious.

The evening of Saturday 6 October was Nuit Blanche, a night of interactive displays and performances throughout the heart of Brussels.  We had found a booklet with information about the various events and decided there were a few things that looked interesting.  We are not really into performance art, but it’s one night a year and we happened to be there.  It seemed like time to broaden our horizons.  All the events were within walking distance of the each other, and we found ourselves passing things we had not chosen to see on our way to other events.  In fact some of these turned out to be fascinating.  Among the events we stopped at were Chrysalide, a huge sculpture made from sellotape; Cyclo-Kino, where participants rode bikes to power the display of moving images on the wall; Phonoscope, where viewers could control how much picture was visible by making noise into a tube.  The louder the noise, the bigger the image.  That one was really kind of cool.  But our real find of the evening was not the event itself (called Men in a Window) but the church it was in.  The event was screened by huge projectors, so the rest of the church was really dark.  This was unfortunate, as the pulpit was amazingly carved and the area behind the altar was beautifully painted.  Like us, most visitors seemed more interested in the church than the exhibit.

That one was on our way home, as it had got quite late by now.  We left the bedroom window open as long as possible to cool the room down and got another pretty satisfactory sleep.

Sunday dawned bright and blue, a glorious day.  We planned to take the blue route on the hop-on bus this time, over towards the east of the city and the Atomium, a molecular-looking structure left over from a World Trade Fair.  We weren’t one-hundred percent sure of its route on this particular Sunday, as we had managed to hit on the weekend of the Brussels marathon.  Still, the ticket people had not said anything the previous day when we got our 48-hour tickets, so we were cautiously optimistic.

We had realised that our hotel was only about a twenty-minute walk from the area of the city we had been in for the rugby, so rather than go down into the Metro again we walked up to town.  We found a nice little café on the way to get breakfast, and soon found ourselves at the bus stop.

After waiting for about 40 minutes, getting more and more frustrated, we approached another group waiting and let them know, in slow English, that we had been waiting ages and were going to the Central stop to find out more.  We had to laugh – turned out they were from England too!  They said they had come from the Central stop and no traffic was allowed through there until 4pm.  Extremely disappointed, we conceded the bus was probably not running at all and made new plans.

We caught the Metro up to the Atomium, hoping for some spectacular views over the city.  The reality was a queue that snaked around for over 150m.  We had already spent enough of our day standing around waiting, so we went for a walk in the lovely grounds around the Atomium and got some great photos of the structure itself.  We then caught the Metro to the Parlimentarium and had a fascinating time learning more about the structure and history of the EU.

By this time we were both pretty tired and suffering from information overload.  We decided to go and get our bags from the hotel, head for the Eurostar station and sit down there with coffee and wait for our train.  It turned out to be a great idea – we were through the security gates very easily and quietly read our books until our train was ready to board.  Issues on the London Underground meant we didn’t make it home in time for Downton Abbey, but we did get a proper night’s sleep to end our weekend away.