Alone in Brussels

They say the early bird gets the worm but all I got was a flight. This was another tiring day as it involved a ton of walking on 4 hours sleep. The Grand Place seemed like the obvious first stop which was honestly a bit meh. Sure it was good architecture and all that but it's all just starting to mould in to the one memory now. Next stop was lunch to form some kind of a game plan, at which point I decided the the Maneken Pis should be next. The statue is quite hilarious. It's a little kid taking leak (and it's a fountain). It's also smaller than you'd expect (that's what she said), but still definitely worth seeing.

I then followed the map to La Chappelle, Place du Grand Sablon and the Palais Royal. Opposite the palance is the Brussels Park which I walked through to Federal Parliament. Soon enough I was back in the city centre where I had my first Belgian waffle and oh my goodness it was that good. It's self service as well...or at least I think it was...none of the others seemed to be but the guy didn't stop me.

By Emma's recommendation I caught the metro to the Cantillon Brwery. It's a very grassroots, family owned brwery who brew gueuze and fruit beers or something. It tasted really good...but not like beer at all. I then came back and had a nap before going and cooking tea. It had been so long since I had actually been full

April 14 - The day I went to another country for the day: The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

But first we made a stop in a small town called Dinant. We shelled out an extra €7 to go up to this fortress and have a tour. It was a bit odd because the tour was given in both French and English. The guide didn't speak English too well but that's ok, until I can speak French fluently I can't complain. On the tour we saw... well I don't know, it wasn't that interesting. There were some old guns then this room that was on a 20 degree slant. So trippy. Apparently Adolphe Sax the inventor of the saxophone was from Dinant, and they claim it for all it is worth!

We got back on the bus and in another hour we arrived in Luxembourg City. The country itself only has about 400,000 people you can imagine the city will also be small... it was tiny. Katherine and Sandra (the girls I met) walked around for a bit while the older people had a 'cheap' meal. I bought some headphones as a souvenir as mine were breaking and our guide gave us a small tour. After that we had an hour of free time and after 20 minutes...we were done. Our guide found us sitting down and showed us a park/valley where I took some nice macro photos and then it was time to go home.

Luxembourg is really not worth going to except to tick off another country from 'the list'. However, it did make a good day trip and I made some new friends. The girls are both from California and are on exchange in Sussex. At night I invited them out for a drink and kind of accidentally took them to a football bar. I was drawn there with €1 drinks and luckily there was a DJ upstairs. I would have felt heaps bad just sitting there with the football on.

April 15

So, plan for the day: hire a bike and ride the suggested walking routes on my map. A very good plan if the machine accepted my card. So instead I caught the metro to the beginning of the European section tour. In hindsight it may have been difficult riding through an unfamiliar city full of cars but I'm sure I could have made it work.

It began underneath a glass skyscraper in a very poor section of the city. I walked through some markets and soon enough was in "the heart of Europe:" a roundabout, around which all the important EU buildings are. I walked through Parc du Cinquantenaire to another Arc du Triomphe lookalike and on to the European Union Parliament, which is a very impressive building. I tell you what too, it's so refreshing to see some modern looking buildings. The last three months has just been historical building after historical building, not that that's a bad thing though.

Next stop was the comic book museum...wait no, not yet, it's closed for lunch for another 20 minutes. Once in there I learnt that entry was €6, a bit steep I thought. After messaging Emma to see if it's worth it, and she said no I decided to do a Peter Durbin and sneak in for free. The lady at the desk was too busy collecting money from other suckers to notice one poor tourist sneaking past. About an hour in there more than wrapped it up and it was definitely not worth €6!

I then caught the train over to Brupark to see the Atomium, a model of an atom enlarged to 58 billion times its size. Unfortunately the security was much tighter here and I couldn't sneak in to anything. Of course by this stage I was stuffed and came back to the hostel and chilled out for a bit. Walked up the road for a quick feed and back to write this entry. During this time a Californian guy called Josh Choi came and introduced himself to me. He's traveling on his own is also stranded by the volcano.

April 16

The single most stressful and frustrating day of this trip. By now the only thing on the news and on Facebook is talk of the Icelandic volcano eruption yesterday that has sent a cloud of volcanic ash above the UK. I got a message from Scott the night before saying his flight had been cancelled and won't make the football match we had tickets to. At this stage my flight was still scheduled so I went off to Bruges hopeful that I could still get to the game and at least scalp their tickets or something.

Bruges is very picturesque. Every street is cobblestone and is lined with medieval houses. It's kind of one of those places that is famous and very touristy, but there's nothing to actually do there. I thought it was a bit boring but I think that's just because I on my own. I had a really map with the things to do on it. It took me to a museum or 2... one was pretty meh, but it only cost €1 so was a good time filler.

I got back around 5 and this is where it gets interesting. checked my flight status: cancelled. Crap, what do I do now? I was due to fly out in the morning. I'm madly asking anyone on Facebook what they about Eurotrains. I learnt that Eurostar had jacked up the price to £223, they're not silly.

I decided to walk up to the train station with Josh and see what I could learn there. Yeah...Eurostar trains to London sold out until the 18th. I then checked coaches, no dice. We got a kebab and walked through the red light district. After a stressful night I needed some fun. So Josh and I headed to Celtica bar and got lost. I maintain that if he just let me lead it would have been fine but I digress. We got there, got a cheap drink and sat down with these 2 guys who literally spoke as much English as I did French. It was awesome because I got to use all the basic French you use when meeting people. They were hilarious and almost sold Josh some pot. He wanted hash though...whatever. We moved to an ared called Delirium, it was very, very cool. It's this area of 6 bars, each specialising in a different drink and each were packed. We went to a beer one (with a selection of 20 odd), then a cocktail one, then absinthe bar. We also met this really hot Italian girl who Josh was shamelessly hitting on. She got our Facebooks but we'll never see her again.

I really wanted to get out of Brussels because there's nothing more to do there so I jumped on to trusy Hostelworld and booked a hostel in Amsterdam. In amongst all the chaos I also ran out of credit on my UK phone. When I tried to top up I realised I had no money in my UK bank account and Vodaphone only accept UK cards. So it was all happening.