Ani MollerOne o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock

Well, I’ve been in Belgium for a week now. I can’t believe I left Manchester two Fridays ago already. It’s scary how time flies.

After a stressful day of finishing packing and cleaning the apartment, we caught our last train to London. Strangely enough, it wasn’t late, delayed, or cancelled. We stayed with my old flatmate from Wellington, Natalie, and her boyfriend Mark in Belham, in south London. I’m not entirely sure how we squeezed into their tiny apartment. I mean, it was really tiny. I’ve never been in a 1-bedroom flat in London before and wasn’t quite expecting the scale of the smallness. You really couldn’t swing a cat. Seriously. Maybe a mouse, but barely.

We had an awesome time in London hanging out with Natalie and Mark, seeing our wonderful humhum friends, and having extremely quick catch-ups with Sara, Adrian, and Penny‘s boyfriend Martin. It was rather odd that her Argentinian boyfriend from New Zealand just happened to be in London that weekend. We also bumped into a guy we knew at a restaurant in Soho. This is weird because we know quite a few people in London, but London is massive. The chances of someone who doesn’t live there bumping into someone are seemingly quite high. This is also not the first time I have randomly bumped into someone while in London for the weekend. This is also odd because I never bumped into people I knew in Manchester. Perhaps because I have no mates.

So, we booked a taxi to get us to Waterloo Station on the Sunday evening so we could catch the Eurostar on time. Of course it never came. Never use 9000 Taxis in Belham. They suck. I had words with both the operator and the lousy taxi driver. Luckily we managed to hail a minicab who got us there just in time and for a cheaper price.

When we arrived at the station, we had about 45 minutes before our train left. I knew we were pushing it but I figured we could make it. I was bloody stressed though, also because we had 500 suitcases.

We queued up with about 2,000 other people and wait in line for about 25 minutes. We get to the turnstall to put our tickets into the machine and of course, they won’t go through. We get told to move to another queue to see a ticket guy because there was something wrong with our tickets. We line up some more. The guy goes to sort out our tickets (which had the seats reassigned for absolutely no reason) and the computer crashes. He reboots. It takes ages. We queue for the security machine and suddenly everyone starts pushing. All these stupid people start pushing us and not letting us through. Now, most things piss me off anyway, but people who jump queues really piss me off. After being pretty much pushed through the security barrier, I turn around and ask in a raised voice for everyone to stop pushing. The French-speaking Belgians look at me with vague apathy and continue to push.

We haul our 500 bags on to the x-ray machine. We quickly load everything back up and race to the other end of the terminal. The guard tells us we don’t have enough time to take the elevator and that we would have to take our bags up the escalator. There is no way that would be faster for us and our many bags. We call the lift and wait for it to slowly get to the platform. I am almost crying. We run down the platform to our carriage and pretty much throw our bags on the train, sit down, and the train leaves. Success.

We stayed with Peter’s parents in Zandhoven for a few days when we arrived. Zandhoven is a small village 16km outside of Antwerp city. There are farms and loads of these quaint countryside Belgian restaurants/cafes. We had a few beers (or coffee or tea for me) there. They are good.

Now, we are staying in an awesome studio apartment above a bed and breakfast in a good part of southwest Antwerp city. It’s about a 10-minute tram ride into the city, which only costs €1. There is a square nearby, lots of cafes and restaurants, a street with the most amazing houses, and a “looky store” which is not a porn shop but actually a video shop. Thank God the Dutch don’t dub movies. Not like those damn French! My favourite show (CSI) was on TV the other night and was dubbed in French. Fuckers!

I have more to tell but it’s late. I’ve been writing Christmas cards for the past two hours. It takes me so long because I actually bother to write something different in each card. And also because I am very easily distracted with shiny things on the internet.

I haven’t been taking any proper photos yet, but I am updating my Flickr photostream daily. Many times a day, even! Pop my Flickr feed into your RSS reader!

I will attempt to start taking photos with my D70 very soon. But first, I really need to finish my Christmas shopping.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Log in to make commenting easier!