Tag Archives: belgium

Brussels, Belgium – April 28, 2013

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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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Part One: Flight of Death into Friends and Beer and Happy

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April 25, 2013 – The day we all have been waiting for.  The day I leave for Europe!!  I had a typical bad day at work, made even worse by it being “Bring Your Kids to Work Day”  Finally the day is over and I am FREEEEEEEEEE!!!!  Europe here I come!!

Well it seems that in addition to being “Bring Your Kids to Work Day”, it is also “Bring Your Kids to Belgium Day”

Whenever I book a flight, I pick my seat.  Last row, window seat on the right side of the plane.  Last row because it gives you the best chance of having a row to yourself.  Window seat because i can not breathe on planes.  Having the window next to me is psychosomatic and makes me feel like I have more oxygen.  Right side because that’s the way I lean when I fall asleep sitting up.

Tonight I get on the plane.  I am still at the door and I can hear the SCREAMING kid.  SCREAMING.  Now let me stop and explain a bit here.  Usually when someone talks about a screaming kid on a plane, it’s about a kid having a meltdown and just scream crying.  That was not what this one was doing.  It seemed to have having the worlds LOUDEST conversation with itself in a language only it spoke.  Lots of “BEEEEEEEEEEE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP” just nonstop.

I make my way to the last row for my seat and this SCREAMING kid is in my seat.  Not in my row, not next to my seat, but IN MY SEAT.  Screaming away IN MY SEAT.  Not only that, but it looks like it is in for the long haul.  It is standing on my seat, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP-ing away, with all its stuff all over the place.   All over my seat, the floor, the seat back pocket.  It has a bag under the seat in front of it.  I recheck my boarding pass because surely I am at the wrong seat?  I’m not.  So my next logical thought is that this thing is in the wrong seat.  I try telling it that it’s in my seat and all I get back is “BEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP”    Finally, the father surfaces and asks me to switch to a middle row aisle seat.  Oh Hell no.  Don’t tell me you got on the plane and completely unpacked your kid in my seat, just expecting I would agree to switch because I won’t.  I tell him no, I need the window or else I will vomit.

So the kid is then moved to the available aisle seat next to mine. This is an enormous production since it had so much stuff unpacked and all over the freaking place.   Even though we are at the back of the plane, there are still people trying to get by so now we have a traffic jam.  The kid is still screaming.  Never once did its father try to get it to be quiet.  Not once.  Finally its out of my way and I am free to take my seat so I do.

I get settled.  Get my stuff out. Notebook, pen, gum, MP3 player, headphones.  I now have everything in the back seat pocket, I am ready to go. Now that I am all settled, this guy now goes all over the plane trying to find someone to give up their window seat to me, so that I can move and still have a window seat.  Then this SCREAMING kid can have my seat and the new person can take the middle aisle seat.  He finds someone.  I am tempted to still say no.  I never actually said I would move if he found me a new window seat.  Everything about this is obnoxious.

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First Time Travel to Europe

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I have always wanted to go to Europe.  Even before I really understood what that meant.

Two years ago, I had this conversation with a friend:

Me: I want to go to Russia

Her:  Me too!  Where do you want to go?

Me:  Uhhhhhhh, Russia?

Her: I want to go to Moscow, St.  Petersburg and ride the Trans Siberian railway.

OH.  I see what you mean.  You don’t just pick a country, you pick destinations within a country.  I was so not even close to being well traveled outside of America that even that had never occurred to me.

I had always wanted to see the world, but had a million different reasons that were stopping me.  I’m scared to go alone, I can’t afford it, I’d rather take an easy vacation instead…and so on.

Then it happened.  I was staring down the barrel of age 40. I was only two years away from the age my mother was when she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually took her life.   I started panicking that I had done nothing in life that I had ever truly dreamed about.   In a way it was kind of like a midlife crisis.  Although as a good friend of mine once told me it’s not because “mid life crisises are for boring people who wake up one day and realize they are boring.  You just woke up one day and decided to be even more interesting”.  Either way, its time to go.

There are so many ways to travel in Europe.  I don’t mean just transport options, although that exists as well. I mean the whole “Where do I go?!?” and so on.  There’s so much to see in this world, how can you possibly narrow it down to ONE destination??

It can be completely overwhelming, which is another reason I had put it off for so long.  There are a million different ways to pick your destination.  How did I pick my first?

One night I was in Las Vegas, for my annual Christmas trip.  Before going to bed one night, I saw a Facebook event invite for one of my favorite bands (Grey Area, if you must know), who were going to be playing Europe for the first time, in Belgium.   I said “if I win enough to buy a plane ticket, I am going”.  Well……the next morning……

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I was completely shocked.  I now  had no reason to not go.  I could not talk myself out of it be Continue reading →

Brussels: Belgium and Geel

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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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