What a first day!

WoW! What an amazing first day in Europe! I had an uneventful flight from Atlanta to Brussels (well, except for the woman puking all over the galley mere moments after I stepped out of the lavatory... ick! The flight attendants were less than thrilled!) Arrived safely in Brussels at 8a local time. Navigating the Brussels airport was a piece of cake (all airports are simple after Atlanta, aren't they?!??), and I caught a taxi to my hotel, arriving just about 9a. My room wasn't quite ready yet, so the concierge suggested I take breakfast in the restaurant, which I did. About an hour later my room was ready, I took my stuff up, quickly freshened up and was back out the door headed to The Grand Place. My lovely friend Kathleen had given me a book on Brussels that I read on the plane, so I had a basic idea of where I wanted to go, and the concierge was nice enough to direct me to the closest Metro stop (which I now know is only a 5 minute walk, but it took me 30 minutes to get there this morning, since I turned right when I should have turned left and ended up meandering through a beautiful - but empty, seeing as it's Sunday in the summer - college campus!)

I finally arrived at the Central Station only to find that Brussels is not that easy to navigate! I had a couple decent (I thought!) maps, and the signage is excellent, but I was still having quite a time figuring out which way was which. I wandered about for about an hour, just happening to stumble upon some of the sights I wanted to see, until I finally found The Grand Place. After that, things started getting easier. I was able to use my maps to find Manneken-Pis, and I was having a great time taking pictures, until I almost fell off a curb trying to get a good angle at some neat architecture and met two new friends.

Alexis and Michel saw me stumble off the curb and started laughing at me, which caused us to strike up a conversation (quite slow and stilted, considering they appeared to know about as much English as I know French) about where I was from and what I was doing in Brussels and where I was headed. At that point, I didn't quite know where I was headed and managed to get that much across to them, so they volunteered to be tour-guides (of sorts), and I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon in their company. What a wonderful, completely unexpected adventure with two Belgians and an American in Brussels! It turned out, between the two of them, their English was WAY better than my French, but understanding language is a lot easier than speaking it (at least for me), so I'd let them babble in French with maybe a word or two of English thrown in, and then I'd try to sort out what they had said by deciphering any Latin-sounding words that could possibly have an English counterpart coupled with the one-year's worth of French vocabulary I remember from Ms. Humphrey's high school French class, 18 years ago. And what amazed me more than anything was how we all improved as the day wore on. We got to the point where we were actually carrying on conversations - strange, giggle-laden, gesticulation-heavy conversations - but no one could mistake our ramblings for anything other than cross-cultural communication! And I got to see a TON of Brussels, including some alley-ways and back-doors and round-abouts that I never would have survived on my own.

And then there was the woman from Charleston, SC who I met in (what Alexis claims is the) BEST chocolate shop in Brussels. Turns out she is a Delta flight attendant from Birmingham, AL (the Charleston sweatshirt was just a guise, but enough to get me to say hello)! We discussed which chocolates I thought were best (why on EARTH she thought I'd have a clue about good vs. bad chocolate, I have no idea), and Alexis and Michel were cracking up that I found a "patriot" in the chocolate shop!

When it started to rain in earnest during our coffee break at the outdoor cafe, I asked my new friends to escort me back to the Metro (since I knew I'd never find it myself). They wanted me to stay and have dinner and go dancing at the Discoteque (which I would have loved to do), but my hotel is out in the suburbs, and I was nervous about being downtown after dark when I didn't know quite how I was going to get back to my hotel, so I declined with a pout, and they took me to the Metro where we bid each other au revoir. I got miserably lost again on the college campus returning from downtown (and was very thankful it wasn't dark!), but I was smart enough to ask for directions from a nice guy in a coffee shop, and he pointed me in the right (5 minute walk!) direction.

So 1 blister, 2 boxes of chocolate, 4 postcards, and an amazing adventure in Brussels later, and I'm ready for a good night's sleep and work (ewww... work??) tomorrow.

Au Revoir...