Interrail Europe 2002

Day Nine (Tue 22nd) - Musak

I woke up tired after an night full of interruptions, a couple of guys checked into our (6-bed) room during the night which caused everyone else in the room to wake up. One guy checked-in at about 1:30am, he just walked in turned the lights on and started doing stuff as if nobody was in the room – in fact there were five of us. If I had been genuinely awake I would have probably said something to him but at that time of morning it hardly seemed worthwhile. Breakfast here was a buffet-style selection of bread, butter, spreads, cereal and cold meats for the meat-eaters – not bad but a bit stale. After breakfast we checked out and asked the receptionist to book us a cab - neither of us really felt like managing the trek uphill to the train station, we departed at 10:20 and arrived at Brussels Nord around 13:30.

One of the first things we noticed about Brussels was that it genuinely is drab, we walked out of the station and followed the map towards the New Sleep Well hostel, past a commercial district and a seedy part of town populated with sex-shops and other dodgy emporia. Unfortunately the hostel was full so we walked-on to the CHAB Vincent Van Gogh where we got a room for €13 per night. After some trouble getting into the building (a dodgy swipe-lock) we hung around and chilled for a few hours, the walk from the station had turned out to be quite a long one in the end.

After a little time to rest we decided to hit the town and go exploring, after a couple of hours we had seen nothing to alter our first impressions until suddenly we rounded a corner of a drab street to stumble upon the Grand Place. It took my breath away. Maybe it was the contrast of crossing from drab back-streets into such a beautiful town square but I get the feeling that my reaction would have been the same wherever I was. The Grand Place is the original town square of Brussels, holding the town hall, the King’s residence and the trade guilds. All the buildings are original and date back to the 17th century, many of the buildings have now become bars or restaurants so we had a drink in one of them and ate in one of the others. The bar served traditional Belgian beers with table-service and a proper beer menu, it was a great place to sit and watch the tourist hustle and bustle outside and see people staring up at the buildings in awe as people have done for hundreds of years.

The restaurant La Rose Blanche (The White Rose), was also traditionally Belgian and Barrie sampled the local cuisine, eating a Flemish beef stew whilst I took one of several veggie options and had chilli-burger. The presentation of the food was excellent as was the service, not a single thing disappointed me about the time we spent in the Grand Place. We wandered out of the Grand Place into the dull sprawl of Brussels, managed to find a metro but got totally confused by the crossover between the metro and the tram system. In Brussels there is a tram system and a metro system, the point where it gets confusing is when you find out that the trams also go underground whilst the metro can also go overground, there also seems to be no distinction between a metro station where you can get a tram or a metro station where you can get on a metro train. This is not the only odd thing about the Brussels metro.

Every station we went in (both tram and metro) was enormous and cavernous, totally unlike the London Underground, every station also played music. The music was of the panpipe/MIDI variety, exactly the type of music that nobody in their right mind would ever buy or listen to. I can only assume that the music is there to provide a calming influence to stressed-out commuters when it gets busy, maybe it even works, the one thing I know for sure is that it somehow manages to be utterly dire and incredibly funny at the same time. There were times we were waiting for trains and we were almost in fits on laughter – I even recorded a 10-second clip of the music as a voice-memo on my phone. After the hilarity of the metro we headed back to the hotel to find we’d gained a roommate, a girl about our age who was washing her clothes in the hand basin. We chilled for a bit, wrote-up the day and went to bed.

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