Brussels

A friend of mine, Melissa, from Canberra recently moved to Brussels to start work with the Australian Embassy there and thought it might be nice to have a mini reunion of all the Canberra people currently living in Europe. So for the past few weeks Melissa has be busy organising for us all to go to Brussels to catch up.

Pat, another Canberra bloke, also few into Heathrow yesterday for a holiday here in Europe, so I met him at the airport before we both boarded our flight to Brussels.

To say Pat looked exhausted when I met up with him would be a bit of an understatement. He had been travelling for over thirty hours and was in need of a good sleep. Luckily our flight to Brussels was on time.

Melissa met us at the airport and we went straight to our hotel where Pat had a nap and Melissa and I walked around. She had just arranged a place to live, but could not move in for a couple of days, so we walked passed that and generally just explored an area of the city that I have not seen before.

We headed back to meet Clem and Saskia who were staying in the same hotel and Cathy, who also lived in Brussels. We let Pat sleep a little longer while Cathy took us to this lovely patisserie near where she lived. The waiter made us order in French, which was interesting, but we all managed to get what we wanted, so it was all okay!

We headed back, got Pat up, had a few drinks and then headed out for some dinner. We then went to a couple of bars before heading to one place called Havana. It was bloody busy inside, and the bouncers just kept letting more and more people in to the point where it was impossible to dance or even move. So we went to leave, but the bouncers stopped us at the door. Apparently the custom in Brussels is to tip the bouncers as you leave a place (well for blokes anyway). So we gave them a couple of euros and got out of there. We then went to a few more bars, before getting back to the hotel around 4am.

The next day Pat, Melissa and I went into the Grote Markt (the centre square) for some food. They had a food market on, so we grabbed some interesting (read not all that nice) food, and sat down and watched the action.

It was then time for me to head out to the airport to fly back. Pat and Melissa were off to Switzerland to do some hiking, while I had to go back to work (I know what I would have rather done!).