Tag Archives: brussels

Brussels, Belgium – April 28, 2013

My original plans for Brussels were:  Get Starbucks, check into my hotel, go to the Atomium, come back and have a nice quiet night in my room to recover  from Groezrock.  Then I could fully start the vacation portion of this trip well rested.

Yesterday, I had taken my camera out to use it for the first time this trip.  I discover that the LCD screen on my camera was cracked.  Are you kidding me?   We can probably assume this happened during the flight of death with the SCREAMING kid.   Oh, did you miss that rant?  Here you go.

But I will take the blame for this one.  It is the second time I have done this.  The last time was just in September.  So this seems to be new recurring problem in my life.  Hello idiot, buy a camera case.  So I now have to buy a new camera.  Oh how I did not want to do this at all.   I don’t like buying anything without insane amounts of research.  I don’t like spending money on new things when I can fix the old things for under ten bucks. I don’t even want a new camera at all.  I LOVE my camera. This was going to be a very painful purchase.

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Brussels: Belgium and Geel

 

After working a full day, I went straight from my job to JFK Airport and boarded a flight to Brussels.   I had a layover in Dublin.   I arrived in Brussels at 9:25 am on April 27, 2012.  I don’t sleep on planes, I have never been able to.  When I landed, I had been up a number of hours I was way too exhausted to do the math for.  Also bonus: when I landed, the clock on my phone was an hour behind.  I have no idea why.  Someone suggested it was because of daylight savings time.  Well don’t phones get the time from a satellite or something?  It was so frustrating because I was so exhausted.  I could not figure out how to manually do the time.  I didn’t want to change the time to another time zone to get it to appear right because what if it auto corrected?  Then I wouldn’t know and was looking at some other country’s time zone.  I have so many trains to catch this trip.  I need to know what time it is!  I am so tired please god please AH YES I FIGURED OUT HOW TO MANUALLY DO THE TIME YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHH.

So despite having my first meltdown before even leaving the airport, I wanted to see some of Brussels.  I collected my luggage, got my passport stamped, took a train to Brussels Centrale and ditched my luggage in a locker.  I was really happy I had Euro coins with me leftover from my last trip so I didn’t have to scrounge for change to do this.

Did I mention I was exhausted?  All I wanted was a large iced coffee.  Everywhere I went, that’s all I could focus on, never got it.

I walked around Brussels a bit and took pictures.  Most of them ended up not coming out. I can see the thumbnails but I get an error when I open them.  We like to call this “act like it’s not happening”.

Brussels has a casino that I could not find for the life of me (this is probably best).   I was able to find Mannekin Pis though, so that was good.

mannekin pis

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