Brussels

We’re on the final leg now, as I write this we have one full day left before we drive home on Sunday 14th October. We spent another day in Bruges on Thursday mostly covering the same ground as before. We did go to Central Station to buy tickets to go to Brussels next morning. We were both amazed to find it only cost €13 for return tickets. That’s two people to Brussels and back for €13! We bought bus tickets next morning and found it costs €6.40 just to get to the station and back. When we got to the station the train was already at the platform at least 20 minutes before time. This left us wondering whether or not it was the correct train. As all the announcements were in Belgian and German (I think) we had no idea what was going on. I asked an old lady who was standing in the doorway of one of the carriages and she went off on a long response, not one word of which I could understand. It seems the only way to know if it was the wrong train would have been if it left before the allotted time for the Brussels train, so she was waiting in the doorway liked an octogenarian coiled spring ready to leap off the train if it turned out to be the wrong one. With less than ten minutes left we decided it must be the right one and got on. Then a small game of musical chairs ensued because Lynne suddenly has to be facing forward in the train. I have no idea what she thinks might happen if she travels backwards. Once we were settled I was glad we declined 1st class tickets (€27) as the 2nd class seats were pretty comfortable and the woman at the ticket kiosk had assured us we might not notice the difference anyway! The journey to Brussels took exactly an hour but we were unsure about which station to get off. It almost goes without saying that we got off one stop too soon. My fault entirely, I lost my nerve amid worries that we might drop off the edge of the planet if we missed our stop. Anyway, thanks to me, we had an extra 30 minutes walking into the centre. Unfortunately, we ended up walking through an area that could have been called Little Syria and justifiably classified as ‘a shit hole’. Not nice at all with gangs of swarthy looking men just sat round doing nothing. I saw one man in particular whose face was really badly scarred with one eye looking like it had no sight. Is it racist to feel uneasy walking amongst these people? They obviously all have their own stories but one can’t help but be reminded of  images in the news not so long ago of groups of young fighting age men travelling through Europe as so called refugees!

Anyway, it made for a pretty uncomfortable walk through those areas until we reached the tourist haven of the central square. Again I was reminded of Lynnes first impression of New York shortly after we’d got married all those years ago. We stayed in the Milford Plaza near Times Square and in a disoriented moment we went out the wrong exit and instead of being on Seventh Avenue we found ourselves on Eighth Avenue which at the time was crawling with prostitutes and a little seedy to say the least. As first impressions go, Brussels was probably not quite that bad but still not great!

It didn’t take long to find the main square with its magnificent buildings. I did my best to take decent photographs but the strong sun overhead and crowds of people everywhere made photography very difficult. I resorted to doing hand-held panoramic shots with the hope of stitching them together later in Photoshop. It took a lot of work in Photoshop to eliminate all the distortion after stitching the images together and they’re far from perfect but I thought it worthwhile including them here.

So, since subscribing to the Daily Mail online, Lynne has become a bit of a political monster and suddenly decided she wanted to see the United Nations Building. I tried to explain that it was miles away but she was having none of it. A warm sticky hour’s walking later we couldn’t find the UN building and had to settle for the European Commission Charlemagne Building. The hours walk seemed like a lot of effort for not very much. As I was writing this, we discussed her political views and in the space of two minutes she went from joining the Conservative party to creating her own party, Scutters ‘R’ us.com. The first party manifesto should be interesting!

Afterwards we walked round spotting wall art of which there’s plenty. It didn’t take long to realise that most of it seemed to be promoting gay life. I kind of lost interest after that. We stopped off in a restaurant called The Old Wild West for lunch. Don’t ask why we would choose a place with a name like that in Brussels. It should have been obvious that it would be basic burgers on offer. The place looked busy because there was one long table with about 20 people sat to eat. Sitting there, we watched one man in particular tormenting a small dog under the table. Every now and then you would hear the dog squeal. Watching this group it was difficult to estimate their nationality but I would have guessed at Italian. Whoever they were, I felt sorry for the dog who looked destined for a miserable life at the hands of his thoroughly unpleasant owner. After eating our mediocre food we went back to the station and boarded the train back to Bruges. The train seemed to be full of young students returning home for the weekend. Should have known better than to travel on a Friday. Arriving in Bruges we left the train and joined the free for all trying to get what seemed like hundreds of people onto one escalator. Half way down, one young woman decided to push past and almost knocked me over. Instead of apologising she turned round and told me I should be standing on the right. Well, I’m well aware that it works that way but given the fact that there were so many people and the whole escalator was packed in front of me, there was nowhere else I could have been. She then had to wait anyway because the people in front weren’t going anywhere fast. So I just put it down to her being a twat, although I would have liked to have smacked her miserable face! One quick bus ride and another exciting shopping visit to the local Carrefour and we were back at the van.