DAY 6- Saturday, April 16th

I woke up this morning and found two female roommates in my hostel room. Their luggage had been there the day before, but they were out all day and came home long after I had fallen asleep. They had both taken classes at Oxford for a semester and they were travelling around Europe for a while before going home. One girl, Ivana, who graduated from UCLA, was also a San Francisco high school classmate of Jen’s, my roommate in Turkey. What a small world- I couldn’t believe it. The other girl, Catherine, had gone to William and Mary. They had been out drinking the night before, and they told me a lot of the beer here has double the alcohol content of normal beer (10 or 11 percent as opposed to 5%- is that right?).

We were all heading to Brussels that morning, so we decided to go there together. I was thrilled to have some people to talk to after going 5 days pretty much all by myself. And they were American, no less! Oh Fortuna, you smiled down on me that day.

On the train en route to Brussels, we met an eccentric woman who told us she was heading to a big flower show in Ghent (If memory serves correct, wasn’t the treaty that ended one of the World Wars signed there? Did I really get a 5 in AP US History and now I can’t even remember the specifics of Ghent in modern world history? Shame on me and my shrinking memory). Anyway, Catherine mentioned how she lives in Austin, Texas, and then this older woman oh so casually dropped into the conversation that she was once incarcerated there. If you weren’t paying close attention to her words, you would have missed it entirely. She said it as if she was telling us she once visited the Alamo and thought it was swell. After she disembarked, Catherine and Ivana immediately turned to me and asked, "Did she say she was incarcerated???" I think we were all a little stunned and amused by it.

Once we got near Brussels, we didn’t know at which train station to get out. There were 2 or 3 options, and sometimes it’s difficult to know which one is the right one, even with a guidebook in hand. A young Belgian woman on the train who knew English helped us out and directed us in the right direction. Once we got off the train, she was kind enough to show us where to store our luggage, and even walked us out of the station and told us where to go for the museums and how to get to Grand Place, which is more or less the epicenter of Brussels. People’s generosity and kindness to baffled tourists and travelers never ceases to amaze me.

It was raining a lot today, so we donned our umbrellas and made our way over to Grand Place. There wasn’t a whole lot to do there, and it was raining heavily, so we thought it best to get inside a museum for a while. I recommended the Royal Belgian Art Museum, which was high on my list of priorities, so that’s where he went. The museum was enormous. We spent a few hours there and barely scratched its surface. We ended up in a lot of the older wings. I didn’t get to see any of the modern collections, but I still saw a lot of interesting work.

The low point (well, one of two) of the trip happened here at the museum, though. My 22 month old Canon A70 digital camera decided to malfunction and break on me when I turned it on to take a shot of a painting inside the museum. The retractable lens got stuck, and then I saw the message I always dreaded seeing on the screen, E18.

Once I got the camera as a college graduation present from my Mom and Dad, I looked up user reviews for the camera online, and noticed a few people had gotten this same E18 message where the gears responsible for opening and closing the camera would malfunction. I checked reviews for my camera a year later and saw hundreds of people complaining about this E18 error and how Canon would offer them no help in fixing it if the one year warranty had expired. They could fix it, but the repair costs would be nearly as much as buying a new camera, so it wasn’t really worth getting fixed. When I read about this, I just prayed that I would be one of the lucky customers who never had a problem with their model, especially when I’d be over in a foreign country where digital cameras cost almost twice what they charge in the US.

Well, 10 months after my warranty expired, I got the E18 message, and I knew immediately that my camera was toast. I never dropped the camera once, always treated it with great care, but some things, malfunctions like these, you just can’t control no matter how many precautions you take. I was just glad it died near the end of my trip and not on the first day before I had a chance to take most of the pictures I wanted.

After the museum, us three walked back to Grand Place. We went to an extremely restaurant in Grand Place and got waffles covered in powdered sugar and chocolate sauce. While I did not have a beer in Belgium, at least I got to eat an authentic Belgian waffle (although a little maple syrup on it would have made a world of difference!) After waffles, I said my goodbyes to Ivana and Catherine- they were catching an afternoon to Paris.

Now, the reason I chose to come to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Belgium for my vacation was because I knew someone living in Brussels- Sophia, a Cypriot woman I worked with at the Cyprus Mail back in the summer of ’03 after I graduating college. I wanted to be able to visit someone and not go somewhere alone, by myself for the week. She was the only friend of mine that I knew in Europe at the time, so I emailed her a month before coming, telling here I’d be in and around Brussels that week, maybe we could meet up for a day.

Well, it turned out to be a busy weekend for her and she had other, closer friends to entertain, so all could she could do was meet up with me for lunch while accompanied by another friend of hers who was visiting from out of town. This was someone I hadn’t seen for almost 2 years- I was really looking forward to hanging out with her for a while, and all I could get was a cursory lunch in a crowded, overprices restaurant. For a while, I felt like an idiot, flying all the way here, spending my vacation time on this- a dank, rainy day in Brussels. Jen was off visiting friends in Dubai, hanging out on the beach and touring desert in a LandCruiser while Maddy was meeting up with her Mom in Crete for the week. As I paid for my $14 turkey sandwich and said goodbye to Sophia, who had to run because she had tickets to an exclusive Brussels nightclub for her and her friend, I began doubting my trip a little bit. I’m not sure what I expected from her, but I expected a little more than that. Maybe a mini-tour of the city, a few hours hanging out, perhaps a floor or couch to sleep on for the night. I was disappointed.

I collected my luggage at the train station and took the subway out of downtown to my hostel. Still raining, it was a bad time for my poor navigational skills and lack of travel-sense to kick in. I got off at the correct stop, and the directions from the hostel’s website said there would be a sign that said "Youth Hostel" pointing in the right direction. Well, I saw no "Youth Hostel" sign of any kind, and discerned no sign bearing the hostel’s name.

Dreary and still raining out, I started wandering around, hoping I’d happen upon it or at least ask someone for directions. I tried calling the hostel on a public phone, but dialing the number as given on their website would not make the call go through. Did I have to dial a zero or a one before the number or add in an area code? I had no idea. I tried all sorts of combinations, but none worked.

I tried asking people on the street and shopkeepers for directions, but not one of them understood or spoke English. The entire neighborhood spoke and only understood French. I couldn’t believe my luck. I figured someone had to know English or at least recognize the name of the hostel or the street the hostel was on, but nobody did. Nobody! I walked around some more, cursing my destination and muttering nonsensical ramblings through gritted teeth as I walked around the neighborhood awaiting some kind of divine intervention to show me the way to my hostel. I wasn’t pouting or being depressed, mind you, but rather I was highly agitated, exasperated, and frustrated- "exagistrated" we’ll call it.

Almost an hour into this hopeless quest for shelter from the elements, again, I tried working the phones, and eventually I was able to get through to the hostel. The front desk clerk explained to me that there were signs for the hostel posted, but they were all in French. That explained it! Me, I don’t know a lick of French, so of course I didn’t recognize or notice the French-language signs. The signs had the word "Auberge" on them, which meant nothing to me other than remembering that there was a French movie released last year called L’Auberge Espagnole.

Once I found the hostel, which was extraordinarily large and clean for a hostel, I had nothing left in the tank. I watched a few minutes of "The Siege" on the common room TV and then I flat out expired on my bottom bunk bed for the evening.