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.

Walking around Brussels felt like walking inside of a movie set.  One minute you are walking down a small street, the next you are in this enormous courtyard of beautiful buildings.   I realize that most of Europe is like that.  But this was my first “walking around on my own” experience in Europe ever so it hit me really hard.

After I got to the point where it was clear I could not stand up any longer, I went and fetched my bag to hop a train to Geel.  I would be staying here for the next three nights to attend Groezrock Fest in Meerhout.

At the time I was in line to buy my train ticket, I can recall my patience wearing very thin when my train was almost leaving and the person in front of me on line was taking forfuckingeverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr at the window.  Looking back, I have no idea why I didn’t just buy a ticket on the train.  Being that I have taken this line before, I know for a fact you can do that.  Perhaps if I had been awake enough to do this, I would have had time to stop at the Starbucks I spotted as I was running to my train.  Hours searching for iced coffee, there is a Starbucks right where I started.  God damn it.

My “home” hotel in Geel.  I love this place.

Rooms come with a free minibar, which has BEER, wine, water, soda, iced tea, different kinds of fruit juices and a chocolate crisp bar.  Did I mention FREE?

The rooms also have really sweet balconies.  Here’s the views I had this time.

So pretty!

Geel has a town square right outside my hotel.  It’s so quaint.

I tried to stay awake until it was at least dark outside, so as to not wake up at six am.  Well I didn’t manage to stay awake, and I ended up getting woken up at six am by a text anyway.

Ahhhhhhhhh BED!!