Interrail Europe 2002

Day Ten (Wed 23rd) - REAL Belgium

The night’s sleep was once again fitful, the girl and some guy were in and out of the room from about 1am – 3am, constantly in and out sometimes turning the light on, sometimes not but always making noise. They seemed to settle down and be in bed by about 3am and by the time I woke up in the morning they had gone. We missed breakfast and headed straight for Brussels Nord where we ate pizza before jumping on a train to Bruges, arriving around midday.

After the short walk from the station (a fairly drab modern building) it was easy to see that Bruges is 100% different from Brussels. Almost every building was old and charming, the streets were often cobbled with small alleyways to walk down, a canal with ducks and tonnes of quaint little shops and cafés. Both Barrie and I came to the conclusion that Belgium’s reputation of being dull and boring must come from it’s premier city – Brussels. We wandered around the town for ages, got a bit lost and managed to end up at a little patisserie on the edge of the town centre. We went in and bought a couple of cakes, my one had multiple layers of meringue, cream, chocolate, pastry and praline syrup – definitely the nicest cake I have ever eaten, EVER. We moved on to the shopping area and quickly ended up in a beer shop where we managed to spend almost an hour browsing and making some tough decisions about what to buy as gifts and for ourselves. After the stress of choosing which beers not to buy we had to have a drink, we sat down in a bar in the market-square, Baz had a Bruges Trippel and I had Cherry Beer – an old favourite. After a little time chilling out we hit the shops again and bought a few more CDs and some chocolate for family. Before we left I managed to introduce Barrie to Belgian Waffles covered in chocolate sauce, messy but marvellous.

We were tired and hungry from carrying bags of beer around the town that we had to leave so we jumped on a train back to Brussels, dumped our stuff in the hostel and went back to the Grand Place. We thought for a while about exploring other parts of Brussels and searching for nicer areas but in the end we decided that the Grand Place was probably unbeatable so we went back and ate the same food in the same restaurant, a little sad I guess but it was so nice that we had to do the whole thing again.

After dinner we went over to the EU Quarter to see if there were any grand buildings where decisions about our everyday lives are taken. There aren’t. Just like the rest of the city (excluding the Grand Place) there was nothing of interest and no redeeming features. I had expected that the grand institutions of Europe would be represented by grand buildings but instead they look like any old office blocks. The only redeeming feature of our little excursion was that wherever we walked around the EU parliament we were being shadowed by guys wielding machine-guns and talking on radios – it amused us for a while at least.

The metro in Brussels (like most others we saw) do not have ticket-gates like the London Underground, instead they are based more on trust and heavy fines for fare-dodgers. Whilst we were on our way back to the hostel we saw a guy being caught and presumably fined for failing to present a ticket to an inspector when asked. The poor guy was surrounded by four armed ticket inspectors until a fifth arrived with a handheld machine which we guessed was being used to issue the fine, they may have been police but they looked like ticket inspectors – definitely an incentive for the guy to buy a ticket next time!

Back at the hostel we were once again woken-up by some new inmates checking-in during the early hours of the morning. Nonetheless we slept.

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