Nobody really knows why they are in Brussels

Leaving Holland, I didn’t want to get too much of a culture shock, so I went the small distance to Brussels. What I didn’t realise is that Brussels will give you culture shock regardless of where you are coming from. It’s about as much like London as it is like La Paz, and nobody there seems to have a clue what’s going on.

Getting Lost

I have been to over 50 cities in the past year, spanning 4 continents. I have had to find my way across international borders in the middle of the desert, navigate my way through slums in the hills of central Colombia and work out how to find the giant slide in Singapore Airport. Arriving in Brussels was genuinely the first time I have been completely and hopelessly lost in all this time. I asked Metro staff, bus drivers and random passers-by how I could get to my friend’s apartment, and yet over two hours after arriving I was totally lost in some neighbourhood where nobody even spoke English (outrageous, right!). I still can’t remember how I actually made it to the apartment but I am pretty sure it involved bribes, sexual favours and a lot of crying (not simultaneously…I hope).

Transport

Leading directly on from my initial disaster was my realisation that the transport system in this city has been designed with speed, efficiency and location as entirely irrelevant factors that weren’t even remotely considered. In Bogota, they have these special new buses called Transmilenio, each of which has a different number and colour that correspond to nothing whatsoever, operate in special “carreras” which are literally just normal bus lanes that we’ve had in London for decades and are constantly too packed to even board. Brussels somehow manages to be even worse with a system that goes nowhere useful, runs about once every half an hour and go such long winded routes that it’s quicker to walk. I don’t get why this is counted as a first world country when they can’t even design a proper bus route.

Ireland and Italy

Aside from spending most of my 4 days in Brussels waiting for and standing on various modes of public transport, I did squeeze in some sightseeing time which was actually very pleasant when I wasn’t ignoring beggars, sheltering from massive storms or paying for overpriced pub food in expat bars. The expat area around the EU area has two main social roads of bars and restaurants that inexplicably only cover two genres: Italian restaurants and Irish pubs. Within a half mile radius I counted 12 Italian restaurants and 9 Irish pubs. Is this some kind of EU initiative where they rotate the nationality of the businesses every couple of years? Where, if I visit again in 2016, it will be full of Portugese Peri-Peri establishments and Latvian vodka bars? I sure hope so cos I love Nandos.

My overall conclusion is that Brussels is suffering from some sort of major identity crisis where it doesn’t quite know what it should be, so it just kind of exists and hopes nobody will notice. This will be because they will be a) too full of pasta and pizza, b) too wasted from delicious Belgian beers, or c) too lost to ever find someone to tell about it.