Brussels and Everything Around It

After the cruise, Adrienne and I had a fun adventure attempting to get back to London as we quickly discovered that it was a bank holiday so the train we were planning on taking wasn't running. Apparently replacement buses were being run, but no one on the dock seemed to know exactly what was going on. Coupled with the complete lack of sleep from the night before, huge waves all night long and a fire alarm at 3am, we new it was going to be a great day. The parking lot was complete chaos as they were unloading 2000 passengers onto various shuttles and airport transfers, and another ferry had arrived only minutes after us.  Eventually, a representatve of the bus line showed up and we were all herded to another parking area where they loaded us onto buses and in the melee we didn't even have to by tickets so at least thats one bonus. Once we reached London, Adrienne and I said our goodbyes, I headed back to Anns house for one more night, and she headed to go meet up with her dad.

The Next day was an early one as I had the first of my many train rides, a 7:30 Euro star to Brussels.  After a comfortable and surprisingly brief ride, I arrived in Brussels to find my uncle Wayne waiting for me at the station. On the way back to his apartment all my memories of my previous stint in Brussels came flooding back to me and everything seemed veru familiar. It was a very action packed 10 days in Brussels, Wayne was entirely prepared to play tour guide for me and had all sorts of ideas. The first couple of days we spent around the city visiting the various sites and museums some of which I remember from my previous stay. When Friday hit, Pascal had taking the day off of work, and we headed to Wayne at Pascals country house near the border with France. It was nice to be out of cities for a change and I definitely hadn't seen farm animals in a while. Their house is only partly finished but beautiful nonetheless, they've done a wonderful job at maintaining its authenticity and charm. The town itself is really, what you would imagine the french countryside to be like, Wayne and Pascal seem to be already updated on the town gossip as well and apparently one of the women who works at the butchers has a little crush on Wayne.

While we were there we also went to visit some of the neighbouring towns, including Chimay where Chimay beer is made. We went to the abbey but we weren't actually allowed into where the beer was made so we walked around instead. I also got to see where they got married (the ceremony) which was nice as I hadn't been able to go to the wedding. We had lunch in the restuarant and walked around the town for a while and even went to do a small hike to where there were some old Roman baths.  The day we returned to Brussels we had lunch/dinner with a couple of friends of theirs, Martin and Viola. I'd met them on my previous trip as well as their daughter Helena who  had been a couple weeks old when I first met her and now is a cheeky 6 year old. She proceeded to boss me around in French for the entire evening and was appalled by my lack of french speaking skills.

We watched In Bruges in preparation for our trip to Bruges, it was a really good movie. Although it meant that our whole day there I was looking at everything in relation to the movie. When we went on a canal tour our guide pointed out the window Colin Farrel jumps out of into the river, and I deffinitely noticed that the stairs to the tower were indeed very steep and very narrow.

The next day Wayne, his friend Axel, My friend Yoli and I took a trip to the coast. Of course the second that we got to the beach it proceeded to POUR rain and we had to run and take refuge in a nearby hotel. When it finally stopped raining we walked along the beach and I got my introduction to Geocaching. If you've never heard of it, geocaching is a sort of global scavenger hunt using GPS point and various clues in order to locate hidden "caches".  After the first cache on the beach Yoli and I were hooked and we spent the rest of the day hunting down caches. We had so much fun the four of us decided to do it again, this time in Cologne, Germany. I only had two final days in Brussels that I spent running around the city, going window shopping with Yoli, we went to a Hamam which is a Turkish bath house, and completing random errands. We had one final night out barhopping around the city. We went to a super touristy bar that had over 100 kinds of beer on tap, that was full of drunk backpackers and random Belgians trying to pcik them up. We did run into one of Yoli's friends from school though, a really nice guy she described as Belgian aristocracy, but we had a fun night. Finally it was time to leave and Wayne and Pascal thankfully offered to drive me to the airport, I hadn't realized that it was over an hour outside of the city and my flight to Rome was at 8am. Somehow it all worked out and I was off to the next adventure.