Stranded in Bruxelles -The City of the Whited Sepulchre

The Grand Place

In Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, the main character Marlow, describes Brussels as "a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre."  By this, he alludes to Christ's characterization of the Pharisees as "whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness."  (Matthew 23:27.)  This is the third time that I've been to Brussels and, in my experience, this characterization is fairly accurate.  In fact, I've never successfully traveled through Brussels without having serious issues.

Until today our trip had been too perfect.  Something was bound to go wrong, and today it did.  Our flight home left Brussels at 12:10 p.m.  We drug ourselves out of bed early enough to catch the 8:36 a.m. train from Bruges.  After our New Year's Eve celebration, that was quite a feat and we were both still feeling pretty rough.

On the train from Brussels to the airport we found out that the woman at the ticket counter in Bruges gave us the wrong tickets.  The conductor pointed this out to us and scolded us, but took pity on our ignorance, seeming more frustrated with the lady from Bruges than with us.  He simply told us to make sure that we got the right ticket next time.  I thought that this would be the end of our troubles, but boy was I wrong.

We got to the airport around 9:50 a.m. - more than two hours before our flight - completely exhausted, only to find out that our flight had been inexplicably cancelled!  We stood in line for over an hour waiting to talk to the airline staff before someone finally explained the situation to us.  When the plane was coming in from Washington, there was a "bird strike."  That means that a bird got stuck in one of the plane's engines.  We were told that, when there is a bird strike, the plane is immediately grounded for 24 hours so that they can clean the engine and make sure it is working properly.  The problem for us, though, was that there were no other flights out of Brussels that would get us home today.  Instead, the airline booked all of the passengers rooms at the Airport Sheraton and comped all of our meals for the day.  The flight situation was so dire that they couldn't even find a way to get a surgeon back to Atlanta today so that he could perform a critical surgery in the morning.  Ironically, the last time that I was in Brussels it was because I was on a flight back to Milan that had been cancelled and I had to stay over in a crummy airport hotel.

If we were stuck in Bruges, that would be one thing, but being stuck in Brussels was not particularly exciting, especially because we were both about to keel over from exhaustion.  Still, we decided to make the best of the situation.  After dropping our stuff at the hotel, we hopped on a train back up to the center of Brussels to do a little sightseeing.

As most everything was closed, we just did a lot of walking around and exploring.  We started at the Grand Place - undoubtedly the part of the city that Marlow was referring to in Heart of Darkness.  The buildings there are stunning.  From there, we grabbed a few beers for later and walked down to the Manniken Pis, a statue of a little boy peeing that has become a symbol of Brussels and Belgium.  They typically dress him up in a wide variety of different costumes, depending on the time of year or the various holidays, but because it's New Year's Day, he was naked.

Our next stop was at the Delirium Cafe.  They are famous for two things.  First, and most significantly, it is the cafe with the largest number of beers - somewhere over 2,000.  Second, they are the makers of Delirium Tremens, which they claim has been voted the best beer in the world (trust me, it's nowhere close).  Still, the cafe was really cool.  It's set in a yellowed basement in a back alley with metal beer posters and trays all over the room.

My last goal for the day was to visit the European Union Parliament.  This proved to be extremely difficult.  We walked for miles, often in the wrong direction.  We followed signs that led us to the wrong places and got lost several times in the sprawl of Brussels.  After two hours of wandering around, we were about to give up and started walking to a structure that I thought was a train station.  Much to my surprise, it was the Parliament.  The building was really neat.  Even though we couldn't go inside, it was cool to be at the epicenter of so many important political decisions.

After finding the Parliament, we were both spent and went back to the hotel to take a nap, have dinner, and relax for the rest of the night (with several good beers, of course).  I'm crossing my fingers that our attempt to make it home tomorrow will be more successful than it was today.