2005-07-20

Yesterday, my first day back from holiday, I brought in a box of Belgian truffles for everyone in the office, being the magnanimous sort. �These are really good,� said one of my colleagues. �You should go to Belgium more often.�

�Go to Belgium yourself!� I said. �You don�t know what I went through to get those.�

So, Brussels. Nice enough, but I had an escalating series of misadventures, mostly due to my own stupidity, that have sadly tainted my view of the city, probably unfairly.

I caught the Eurostar from London early Friday morning, arriving in Brussels at the Gare du Midi around midday. Taking the train is so much better than flying � no endless check-in procedures or baggage claim or any of that nonsense. Hopping off the train, baggage in hand, I figured I�d just pop to the loo, get some Euros from a cash machine and be on my way � in a gigantic international train station, cash machines and public facilities should be thick on the ground. Or so you would think: I walked for half an hour without finding a toilet. I finally located one down a dark hallway at the end of a confusing trail of misleading signs, and discovered that I�d have to pay 50 cents to use it. All right, fine: I�d just quickly run to a cash machine and buy a Coke to get some change. After another onerous trek halfway to Hell and back (or halfway to Holland, at least), I consulted a map (genius!) and discovered that the Gare du Midi houses exactly zero bank machines. Fine. There was an exchange desk, and I decided to just change the twenty pounds I had in my pocket and find a cash machine later. So I got in line. And I waited. And another half hour of my holiday trickled slowly into history. I began peering anxiously towards the front of the line, where people were performing mysterious and complicated transactions with triplicate sets of handwritten forms. The Australian behind me began complaining loudly, and I nodded politely, edging away so that no one would think I was with him. Just as it was beginning to seem that I�d see nothing more of Brussels than the train station, I got to the front of the queue, where a surly woman ignored me completely whilst finishing her telephone conversation and at long last got around to changing my money, coldly rebuffing my attempts to speak French. I sprinted back to the toilets and, much relieved, made my way to the subway.

My hostel wasn�t in the city centre, but it was in a fairly lively neighbourhood on a major road, and I didn�t think it would take me long to find a cash machine. No, not long at all! Barely an hour! And of course the machine I did find was broken. I started to suspect I was being filmed. Eventually I located a working machine, only to discover that the system wouldn�t accept a British bank card. What? Brussels is the capital of the European fucking Union! Shouldn�t banking be convenient for all nations? Fine. FINE! I took out a cash advance on my credit card, which I hate doing, and upon which interest is rapidly accumulating as we speak.

I checked into the hostel, which was very clean and posh, but which had oddly draconian regulations: for example, by ten AM every morning, all guests had to vacate their rooms, taking their luggage with them, and stay out until two in the afternoon, leaving their luggage stored in the locker room. So every morning, bright and early, I had to pack up all my things (wet towels included) and then unpack them every afternoon � just like checking in all over again! Fiiiiiiiiiiine.

Having got the logistical end of things under control, I set off to explore the city. Brussels is very compact and easy to get around on foot, or so said my guide book. I found the cathedral and the Grand Place easily enough and had a vague notion of going to Ixelles, but I tend to wander pretty much at random and have no sense of direction, no ability to read maps and a pathological unwillingness to ask for directions: I am convinced, common sense be damned, that I will end up where I want to be through sheer bloody-mindedness. This approach works surprisingly often, but mostly I end up tired, annoyed, and miles off course. I also tend to find myself in some pretty dodgy areas.

For instance. Shortly after leaving the tourist area, I tried to take a picture of a charmingly derelict old building and found that the zoom button on my camera didn�t appear to be working. Bloody bother! I stopped walking for a minute to fiddle with the damn thing. Two seconds later, a teenager ran out of nowhere and tried to snatch the camera from my hands. Luckily I happened to have the strap around my wrist, and I managed to wrench it away. I bellowed �GO FUCK YOURSELF, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!� at the kid but of course he was off like a shot and when everyone on the street stopped to stare at me I was standing completely alone in the middle of the sidewalk, cursing and carrying on like a psychopath. Heh. Hilariously, when I inspected the camera, the zoom was again functioning perfectly. Perhaps my assailant was not a would-be robber at all, but a lightning-fast vigilante camera repairman!

I kept walking, not the jolliest and most carefree of holidaymakers at this point, and the neighbourhood went from bad to worse. It was searingly hot, and I was wearing a tank top � another bit of bad planning, I discovered. The area was populated mostly by recent immigrants from Muslim countries, many of whom were understandably not accustomed to seeing women traipsing about half-dressed and elaborately tattooed. I was stared at, pointed at, muttered at, whistled at and shouted at; and one fellow, evidently not entirely well, took a single look at me and exploded in a fit of apoplectic rage. My lexicon of Algerian French profanity is admittedly paltry, but I do know that I got called a whore, for starters. Oddly enough, saying �Oi, fuck you mate� and flashing the �up yours� sign did not defuse the situation, and I started to worry that the guy was going to take a pop at me. He did spit at me (well, he spat on the ground beside me, which is definitely me-adjacent), and he kept up the stream of vitriol until I was two blocks away.

Fucking, goddamn FIIIIIIINE.

At long last, after going in circles for another hour or so, I figured out how to get where I was meant to be going (oh, that south!) and things looked up a bit: I saw some great Art Nouveau architecture and had a delicious beer in a cute little Parisian-style tavern. I was dead knackered by nine o�clock and went back to the hostel to go to bed � I hadn�t noticed when I�d checked in that my room was directly overlooking a large patio, which turned out to be the bar area. The raucous laughing, screaming and smashing finally began to dwindle off around three AM, and not long after that I think I might have actually slept for a few minutes�to be awakened by a strange person entering through the wide-open door and rummaging around under my bed, where I�d stashed my luggage.

�Can I help you?� I inquired in frigid tones. The stranger turned out to be a contrite Englishman, who had put his own backpack under the bed earlier in the day. (Oh, how I do love contrite Englishmen! English men do �contrite� better than anyone in the world � not surprisingly, as English women do �strident and bitchy� better than anyone in the world.) I apologised for my rudeness, he apologised for waking me up, we both apologised a bit more for good measure like good representatives of our respective nations, and finally, finally I went to sleep.

To be continued