Here today...

Brussels from high up

The first night of our great journey was spent in slightly less auspicious surroundings than you might expect, it was in a small flat in Surbiton, south London, rented by tom, whose idea it was that we should undertake such a journey. Surbiton has a reputation for being a boring and purely functional town, as it has no centre, no high street and is devoid of any buildings that display an inkling of character. Luckily Surbiton was just somewhere to sleep and therefore we didn't have to spend much time there.

Welcome to the Tin Tin shop!

It was at the beginning of this first night that I met a third of our travelling party, a french girl called Marylise who knew Tom through university. If I had paid more attention to Tom's time at uni I might have known more about her before spending a whole two weeks in close proximity. But even though Tom had written a play about his time in uni, which I was involved in, all I knew about Marylise was that she was french.

We made good time on our first full day, leaving surbiton on the first train of the day, arrived early at St Pancras with plenty of time to check in at the Eurostar. I had a sharp awakening when I forgot to take my belt off before going through the metal detector and was promptly frisked by a big black security guard who, when he had finished, gave me a cheeky grin and a Thank You for my co-operation and gestured for me to carry on through. I gave my own thanks to him for a thorough job and carried on quite awake now, despite it being so early in the morning.
We travelled through France barely without realising it and arrived in Brussels with a short stopover, granting us enough time for a cursory walk around the city, deciding to strike out from the station without a map and just navigating using tall buildings and spires. We found the old quarter eventually, by following the old city walls, and had ourselves a celebratory genuine Belgian Waffle near to a local landmark of a small statue of a boy weeing into a pond. (He apparently has over 600 costumes that mark national holidays, events and any other excuse to dress up.)

Belgium is the birthplace of a very well-known cartoon character who has many books, a TV series and most recently a film, he has been to the bottom of the ocean, into space, across seas and deserts and always up for an adventure with his friends. Since the first Tin Tin comic strips appeared in newspapers, he has been embraced by the people and Brussels is littered with lots of touristy Tin Tin knick-nacks, artwork and the official Tin Tin shop!

After two or three hours wandering around, we caught a train to Cologne where we were plunged suddenly into the middle of a carnival! The man in the ticket office wasn't able to tell us what was being celebrated, and there was a conspicuous absence of advertising or even police, but it was all very good natured. The general theme seemed to be that there wasn't a theme, you just dressed up in/as whatever you wanted, perhaps drank some beer, join a spontaneous drumming collective or have a sing-song outside an irish-themed pub.

One drumming group's human metronome

There are too many photos of all the costumes to put in this post, so when I get round to uploading all the photos into a public domain, I'll put up a link on here as well.

Unfortunately we only had a few hours in Cologne before catching our first overnight "sleeper" train. We weren't feeling rich enough to spend €40 on a cabin bed, so had to try and sleep in a small cabin of upright seats, with two ladies who didn't speak english. A fitful night of half-consciousness and being shunted as the train split into three at Hamburg meant that we were starting the holiday with a sleep debt!

It was strange to think that at 5pm the previous day I was in work in Cardiff, and just 24 hours later I had already been through England, France and Belgium and was waiting in Western Germany for a train to Denmark!

Next time: The Little mermaid, canal-based piñatas and the first glimpse of snow.