The Plan: to take a rail holiday in Europe, going where we want, changing plans on a whim. The players: John, Chris, and Sunil, all old friends from school. Sunil is after the cool climates and rugged landscapes of Scandinavia, while John would rather have the sun and the sand of the Med. Chris likes the coasts, and I prefer the cities. So I go into this with a sense of trepidation.At 09:30, Chris and Sunil arrived at my house. At ten dad drove us to our local train station for a short journey to London’s Waterloo, where we met John and checked in for our Eurostar service to Brussels.

Eurostar pulled slowly away from the terminal – very slowly. In fact it virtually crawled all the way through the south of England to the channel tunnel, a subterranean rail link between the UK and France. Once in France, it sped up to a relatively phenomenal speed, delivering us to Brussels at 16:10.

Five hostels were listed in my lonely planet guide, and after calling all of them, it seemed there was only one hostel room left in the whole city. Amazingly it was a four bed dorm so it was perfect for us.

The hostel was not within walking distance of Bruxelles-Midi Station, so we went to a ticket office to get some information on a local train. The guy at the desk looked at my interrail pass, shrugged, and said ‘is OK’, with a look of supreme indifference which I assumed I would get everywhere and basically means “you have an interrail pass therefore are the least important person I will talk to today”. It was good that it was that simple though. Mind you, the distance we wanted to travel was less than 2 miles, so it wasn’t exactly an expensive ticket anyway.

Journey 1: London to Brussels
3 legs, 340km, 3 hrs. Average speed: 113kph
Origin/Destination	Departs	Arrives	Carrier	My Rating
London Waterloo Bruxelles-Midi EST	12:27	16:10	Eurostar
Bruxelles-Midi EST Bruxelles-Midi	16:11	16:21	Walking
Bruxelles-Midi Bruxelles Nord	16:21	16:28	IR

The hostel was a welcome sight, especially since we had slightly underestimated the distance from the station, and greatly underestimated the steep hill which chose to locate itself in our path. Having ditched the backpacks, we hit the streets.

Trouble is, ‘hitting the streets’ implies some kind of cultural intermixing and discovery, but this proved to be very difficult because Brussels did not seem to be very interesting. The population seemed to be hovering around ten, the buildings were uninspiring and even the weather seemed to agree that Brussels wasn’t worth bothering about.

After wandering through a park near the national parliament and having dinner, we found some people. Doesn’t sound like much of an achievement but to know that our presence here wasn’t doubling the population was very reassuring. The large number of people were inhabiting a restaurant district where we really should have eaten, had we found it earlier.

After a quick stop in Easyinternet for some information about the next day’s events, we went to see the ‘Manequin Pis’. This attraction very neatly sums up Brussels as a tourist destination. It’s a very small statue of a boy urinating. The museum about it is hundreds of thousands of times bigger than the statue itself. Looking at this piece of sculpture, partially obscured by hordes of Sony handycams and Japanese tourists holding them, I thought that basically it wasn’t very good. And with that we went to the pub.