Belgium

I remember crossing the border into Belgium because suddenly it became much easier to cycle, it was like being in Milton Keynes – there were cycle paths everywhere. I even got beeped at if I was on the road they were so unused to having cyclist on the road.

I had a nice afternoon on the way to Brugge, it was all beginning to sink in and I was beginning to feel that I had made a great decision to do this. I was enjoying the freedom and control and so far that day I had not encountered any hills.

Arriving in Brugge was nice, I just followed some signs to hotels until I found one cheap enough. I had a walk around but wasn’t too late to bed. I liked the atmosphere in Brugge and enjoyed my evening, but I wanted to be up early the next day as I was going to cycle to Brussels to visit some friends there. I had a good day of cycling, but I remember the magical feeling I got when I arrived in Gent. I’d come right into the city centre and I had this fairly tale view over this cobbled bridge to all of these old buildings, I’m not sure the photo does it any justice (this was before digital and I was very sparing with photos).

When I eventually got to Brussels I was quite surprised to find that it was hilly, at one point I was cycling up a hill with tram coming up behind me and it felt more like San Francisco. I got to the centre and then started looking to find where Leuven was as I had assumed it was close to the centre, to my dismay it was about 20 miles on the other side of Brussels.

Even worse those 20 miles involved a lot of hills and so I was quite exhausted by the time I got there. I was due to meet Andrew at the school he worked at – The British School, which was bizarre place to go into, I was now accustomed to being in Belgium and lots of things were slightly different to the UK. I walked into this school and not only was I suddenly back in the UK, it also felt if it was 18 years previous because the school was very similar to my old school.

I had to help Andrew out with some stuff at the school and then we headed off to their flat, Zsuzsa was flying in from the UK, because she was working still in the UK but in Leuven for the weekends. Andrew and I went for a beer as Zsuzsa’s flight did not arrive until about 10pm. I think being in school must have allowed me to focus more on the differences between Belgium and the UK. I was quizzing that bar about a couple of things, but one thing I really wanted to know was why there were bread vending machines by the side of most roads. His answer was simple “How else would you buy bread at 3am in the morning or on Sundays – sometimes you really need bread!”. This was one of the first simple answers I got to many of the stupid questions I would ask as the year went on.

Over weekend I had a great time with Zsuzsa, we managed to lock ourselves out of the flat and then had to spend Saturday afternoon on pub crawl until Andrew came back from work (that turned out to be 10pm). Sunday we went into Brussels to find the statue of the pissing boy and visit the EU parliament and other tourist things, but ended up getting the wrong train (my mistake – I didn’t know there were two places called Leuven, how stupid!). We found ourselves with an hour to kill in a town in the south of Belgium and decided to try and find some famous Belgium waffles – big mistake no one understood us.

For some reason I can remember very well the meal I had on my last night in Leuven it was a huge bowl of Salmon linguine, and it seemed to be the best meal I eaten on the trip I tucked along the next day on my way out of Belgium to the Netherlands. I only really remember going past the Stella Artois brewery then I was on the Dutch border.