Frankfurt -> Bruxelles
The first think I noticed landing in Frankfurt, aside from the snow on the ground was the word “Welcome” painted in tall black letters on the side of some large water storage tank type construction. It took me a second but I realized yes that is in English, no it shouldn’t be. Planes probably go too fast. It wouldn’t be that difficult of a trick to deposit an unsuspecting traveler in an unexpected country and be oblivious to the fact. Airports pretty much all do look alike. Although Frankfurt and several other places have these really cool clacky signs that rotate through letters to display departures. I’ve never been anywhere that had them before. Maybe you’ve noticed them in movies like the Bourne Identity or The Terminal. They’re pretty slick. Some of you with exceptional memories will remember that I had to wait for 2 hours going through British Passport Control, so German efficiency was dully noted. The train station is connected to the Airport so a short walk and I was waiting for my train. The first stop on my travels was a trip to Brussels or Bruxelles as it’s often printed in Europe. I knew my friend Lindsay was traveling through Bruxelles with some friends so I thought it would be fun to catch up with them. The two prominent languages in Belgium are Flemish and French. I speak some French but no Flemish so I missed my stop on the local train due to my reading the Flemish sign instead of the French sign but a phone called fixed that up. My mobile phone worked in Europe so that made things fun, although it was a little pricy. Lindsay was visiting along with her fellow traveling companions Rebecca, Emily, Stephanie and a Young Life friend by the name of Alison. The first thing I did arriving in Bruxelles was pile in to a relatively small car with these 5 girls and drive to waterloo for lunch in a quaint little cafe. Wandering around downtown Brussels, one stumbles seeing the two most important sites, the town square, and the Manikin-pis. This statue evidently dates to the 8th century although it was recast at one point when some hooligans broke it. It is a fountain of a little boy relieving himself. Evidently the tradition is that during the course of the Holiday year, the little boy get’s different clothes, culminating in a Santa suit for Christmas. Over the years he’s gotten quite a few changes of cloths and they have a museum devoted to them. Heading back to Alison’s apartment, we made dinner a cheap dinner that was very tasty and sat around discussing theology. I’m not sure how these conversations find me but they’re rather fun in moderation.
Europe has these great places of lodging called Hostels; I took another local train and arrived at the Vincent Van Gough Centre, A hostel for those under 35. The interesting thing about them is that you get a bed and not much else, but it’s cheap and you’ll probably share your lodgings with several other people you don’t know. In retrospect the most interesting things that happen when traveling are the problems that you encounter and have to get through. However, they are very annoying at the time. I was planning on using my mobile phone to wake me up the next morning, however the battery went dead. That’s a slight problem. Here I am my body clock is way off and I need to get up on time the next morning. My charger uses 220 or 110 but the problem is that they use different plugs and there was no conceivable way my plug was going to fit in that wall socket. I walked around talking trying English and broken French. The sort of people that frequented this hostel seemed fairly similar. They’d been to this place that place and the other place and gotten the T-Shirt. It’s fairly intimidating. I finally got to talking with a guy named Sergey from Moscow who spoke broken English. I showed him what I knew about Bruxelles and he let me borrow his charger so I could get enough of a charge to wake me up in the morning.
