Letters to friends

As a funny aside, the directions we got from the backpackers were along the lines of:

• Go to Brussels North train station
• Walk 3 blocks north
• Walk 5 blocks East
• Walk 3 blocks South

We followed them on the day we arrived, but thought it was a bit strange. On the 2nd day of our trip, we had to go back to the train station to go to Bruges, so we took to more direct route of just going 3 blocks east. It turns out the reason for the detour was that the 5 blocks between our hostel and the train station were the red light district.

At least that is what I think it was, but it might be a Belgium tradition to put red neon lights around the corner of your full length street level window, and then sit on a chair and watch passers by. In a bikini. At 9am on a Sunday.

For some reason all the ladies seemed to be Black, but maybe that was just the streets we walked down.

On our last day (or so we thought) in Brussels we didn’t get up to much. We checked out of our hostel in the morning, and left our bag there in a locker to pick up on our way to the airport.

It had been snowing during the night, and there was about 2 cm of snow.

A winter wonderland

Mysterious Tracks in the Snow

We did stumble across this cool sculpture by Arne Quinze called “The Sequence”

The Sequence, by Arne Quinze

Around 5pm, we went back to our backpackers, picked up our bags and went to the airport. When we got there we found out that our flight had been cancelled, due to the heavy snow in London. We were able to rebook for 7am the next morning.

We looked into taking the train back, but it was €250 per ticket, and there were no more trains that evening. To give a sense of scale, our cheap air tickets were £90 return each.

After that we thought about staying at the airport hotel, but that was €260 for a room. Our hostel had been £50 a night, but we weren’t sure if we would be able to get another room there, and didn’t really feel like getting a train back into town, and then having to walk back to the hostel again. So we decided to spend the night sleeping in the airport.

Staying at an airport over night is something that I would recommend everyone do at least once in their life. Unfortunately I had already done it when I was 16. We got a spot on some chairs by an area that was walled off for construction, so it had a little section of kind of secluded floor space. It was quite close to the elevators and escalators though, and I’m pretty sure that someone driving a Zamboni drove right past us 4 times in a row at around 3 in the morning cleaning the floors.

At least we didn’t have any trouble getting up for the 5am check in.

Sarah and I went to Belgium for a long weekend.

We spent Saturday and Monday in Brussels, and met up with Manneken Pis, a famous statue of a happy pissing boy whose name in dutch means “Little pee man.”

Manneken Pis

The day we saw him he was wearing what looked like a boy scout uniform. He has over 600 different outfits in all, and they get changed regularly. We just missed out on seeing him in his Mozart outfit. Sometimes he gets hooked up to a keg of beer, and they fill cups up and hand them out to the crowds.

He wasn’t doing that the day we saw him, so we went across the road to a pub and had a couple of large glasses of Belgium beer. Sarah really liked the cherry flavored beer called Krick.

Sarah and cherry beer

I bought a fake australian hat from a traveling hat salesman, after shrewdly bargaining him down from dix-neuf to cinque euro in the space of about 10 seconds by repeatedly telling him I didn’t want to buy it. Sadly the thrill of the incredible discount was soon replaced by buyer remorse.

Shen and €5 hat

We also went to the cartoon museum, to see about Belgium comics, of which Tintin, Lucky Luke and the Smurfs are the most famous internationally.

Tintin on the moon

Discovering America