Pictures from this day can be found here.
Waking up was a little tough after such a long start to our trip, but we weren’t on any tight schedules so we could sleep in a bit and enjoy the comfortable beds. We had breakfast at the hotel because it was included in the price, and they put on quite a feast. There weren’t many people staying at the hotel to enjoy it, but Kuniko and I certainly did. Again the breads were great, and they also had lots of variation of yogurt and cereal. Sometimes they were combined already, so it was a bit of an adventure to try some new things.
We checked out of the hotel and then went on foot to the station. On the way we found a couple of supermarkets, and so we stopped to buy some shampoo and conditioner (because you can never be sure if hotels will have them) as well as some other supplies. The supermarket was much different from Japanese ones – about 60% meat, 30% cheese, and 10% everything else. I bought some ibuprofen on my own using an app that I downloaded for my iphone that led me to a pharmacy, and another app that told me how to say “Can I buy something for a headache?” in German. The iphone was very useful on the trip, but there were some drawbacks. I turned off data roaming and 3G to avoid big charges to my account, so that effectively turned off my GPS – I couldn’t really use the GPS to navigate unless I happened to be near a Wi-Fi spot. Luckily there were plenty of wi-fi spots around, it is just a pain to take time out of your vacation to go look for one. So the iphone was a mixed success.
We caught a train to Brussels that passed through Luxembourg. The scenery on the way was very nice, mainly following the river. Once we arrived in Luxembourg we passed a huge building on a hillside, overlooking some other smaller places down below in a river valley – we went by so fast we had no time to take a picture but it was one of the more dramatic things we saw during the trip and we had no time to really go and check it out. More research is necessary to figure out what it was.
We had about an hour to kill transferring in Luxembourg, so we went out into the town to get some sandwiches and drinks to take on the next leg of the train trip. Big surprise that shouldn’t have been – everybody there spoke French. I was just getting used to speaking German and now it was all French. That caught us off-guard, but all in all my French is probably better than my German, and both of them are extremely limited anyway. There was always English to fall back on, and I admit that we did that quite a bit this trip.
On to Brussels, and we arrived after another couple of hours on the train. I spent the time dozing off, watching the scenery, writing in my journal, and enjoying not having to do much of anything. It was a good way to travel.
My first impressions of Brussels – very old, but liberal. The city was fun to walk around in, and the people around us seemed to be slightly more eccentric than what we found in Koblenz. I liked the feel of the city, but it was very crowded and there were a lot of cars like any big city, and that kind of detracted from the old feeling I got.
From Brussels station we walked across town to find our hotel (NH Hotel Brussels City Center), after a few wrong turns. It was in a good location, and also very clean. The staff were a little flaky, though, and they couldn’t figure out how to process my credit card correctly. Turned out that the machine was out of paper… huh. We unloaded our stuff and went to look for something easy to eat close by. Ended up on a touristy street eating at a restaurant called Montenegro. Eastern European food that was nothing special, but the beer was good and the atmosphere of eating on the street was fun. Some street entertainers walked by now and then and included transvestite magicians and a sax player. How’s that for liberal?
We headed back to our room and enjoyed one of the bottles of wine from Rudelsheim, and then crashed out. Another day, another two countries.
