Brussels, 19-20th June

First destination on my tour of Europe was Brussels, Belgium. Travel is pretty expensive in Europe but there are offers and loopholes for broke college students like me to travel a bit cheaper. I have a "Eurail pass" for four countries and 10 days, which basically means I can travel around in four countries of my choice (France, Switzerland, Spain, and Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg count as one country)) for 10 days (not necessarily consecutive) within 2 months. But even with that there is problems of seat reservation and train routes, couple that with the fact that night transport in Zurich sucks and you can see me walking to the train station at 3:30 am to catch the first train out.

We (a friend and I) travel to Basel, in Switzerland, and from there take a French train all the way to Brussels. I remember very little of that as I was asleep most of the way. Occasionally drifting out of sleep I could hear partially recognizable french around me, which was strangely comforting after the completely unintelligible German I hear all day in Zurich.
We finally arrive in Brussels at 1:45 pm, after traveling through all of France and Luxembourg. Belgians, in all their wisdom, did not build a tourist information counter in the railway station and we didn't have a map. So we ask around for the most famous spot in Brussels and find "Grand Place"

Grand Place is a huge plaza surrounded with medieval buildings with 'mind-blasting' architecture! There we spot a tourist info counter and get ourselves a map.
Conflict of interests and time constraint in meeting my other friend meant we didn't get to do much till 6 in the evening except book tickets out of there for the next morning. I meet my other friend near a famous statue called Manneken Pis (basically a kid peeing, I don't see anything special in that) We eat Belgian waffles (awesome) and walk around town taking pictures. By nighttime we were pretty tired and hungry but we had decided not to book a hotel/hostel but spend the night - homeless!


After surviving a crazy underground concert that looked like it was taken right out of a Blade movie (with the vampires drinking blood all around) we walk around Brussels in the dead of the night, looking for a bar to spend the rest of the night. The night wasn't so dead actually. Great thing about Europe is that you can drink just about anywhere. So at 1 am we see people at public places with 12 packs and wine bottles getting smashed. But we had no intention of freezing outside and after a lot of looking around we find a bar that was still open (disappointingly, bars in Brussels usually close very early). We order a couple of Belgian beers (not good, too watery) and go to sleep!
About 4 am the bar closes and we venture out to find a new bed. Luckily enough, McDonald's is always around the corner.
But even McDonald's closes at 5 am there and we are kicked out yet again. The sun rises on us walking around like zombies exhausted from the day's travel and the night's partying! We decide to head to the railway station and thankfully found a few benches there. Soon it was time for our bus out of there. On to Amsterdam!