Brussels Travel Tips

1) Service at anywhere sit down is friendly but leisurely. They don't feel compelled to give you your check or follow up with you. Like, ever. However, once they come around to your table, the serving staff are your bestest friends ever.

2) The Brussels Central (Bruxelles Central/Brussel Centraal) train station is like an alternate universe version of New York's Penn Station where everything is modern and clean, it's not too crowded, and there are informational signs everywhere.

The Brussels Metro system is cleaner than the New York subway, but smells just as much like pee, if not moreso, as if someone decided to go all Mannekin Pis all the way down each walkway. Also, you don't need to swipe your ticket all the time, just have it validated in case someone checks.

3) The road structure of Brussels completely thwarts the non-SAS or Green Beret in keeping a solid direction sense, especially on a cloudy day. You will find yourself heading in the exact opposite direction for several blocks, but then, since everything in Brussels is right next to everything else, you'll pretty much be where you want to be anyway.

4) 25 centiliters of beer is remarkably cheap in Brussels supermarkets. Go buy plenty; it's less than $2 a bottle, which you basically can't get for beer of any real quality in the US.

5) Coca Cola is cheaper anywhere but vending machines, which are cheaper anywhere but the airport. Coca Cola "Light" (what we call "Diet") with lemon seems to have real lemon juice in it and is worth drinking.

6) The Magritte museum is closed this January, but that's probably for the best, given that it likely has a Magritte-style approach to geometry, and is therefore a madhouse of floating items, faceless men, openings to the sky where items should be, etc.

Links for the Travel

To elaborate on the Sherbs's post a bit, here are the links for the truly outlandish things I occasionally mention:

• Sleep in a caboose they detach from a train in West Virginia! Try not to think about all those horror movies involving people abandoned in the woods!
• Check out those whirlpools in Naruto, off the coast of the island of Shikoku in Japan! Note that this has nothing to do whatsoever with cartoon ninjas!
• If I had at least £500 to spend on a cruise, I might take a Fred Olsen Cruise. They have a pretty awesome one of the Baltic Sea leaving from Dover.
• There's a whole mess o' bed and breakfasts in Virginia. Stay in someone else's bed after your wine tour! We'll try not to make it too much like this wine tour.
• Brussels has a museum devoted to comics. And not just the Smurfs and Tintin, it seems.

I'm psyched for these trips I'm not yet taking, too.

I ♥ my Soyuz

My trip to Savannah was via Amtrak, and since it was a 13-hour ride, I got a sleeping car for the way back. The term for the cheap sleeping accomodation I bought is the "roomette," which makes the accomodation sound cuter than it is.

On the plus side, it's a private room with two beds and a door which is soundproof enough to drown out the toddler across the way.

On the semi-minus side, while the seating arrangement is more comfortable than coach class, you get the feeling that you're in a space pod. And it's not just that the Amtrak design comes from the era of Skylab, so all the buttons have that 2001 feel. It's that you have an inconveniently-placed toilet and fold-down sink right next to one of the seats. Just sitting there, in your roomette.

When it comes time to sleep, the seats fold down into one bunk, and another bunk (with crash webbing to keep you from falling out) descends from the ceiling. The bunks have plenty of headroom, but are not much wider than I am.

But night is where's where the Mir-type joy of the roomette comes in: the switches do not always work. Sometimes the overhead lights turn on; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they turn on in the night when you don't want them to, and then there's the mysterious beeping noise.

While it is immeasurably better than trying to sleep through the night in Amtrak coach class, flying is an equally strong option.