Fighting against a French style, by IME Korean and English keyboard enabled computer, copy&pasting the commas because I can't find it and the "m" and the "@" symbol for email doesn't work right - this is my first post from our hosts computer. We'll spend the next three nights at Mrs Park's house, who offers mainly Koreans, but also other people a place to stay in Bruxelles.

Our trip started out a little bit problematic, since we couldn't buy a ticket for the regional express train to Cologne. Three ticket vending machines didn't accept my money or my card, so we didn't have a choice but to dodge the fair. The ride with the Thalys was great, for ten Euros per person I would even stand all the way, but we had comfortable seats and it went smooth all the way until ... well until "Brussel-Zuid". I blame the hot weather that I was looking out for "Bruxelles-Midi", as it was written on our tickets, so when the train stopped at Brussel-Zuid, we didn't get out. "Zuid" also sounds a little bit like "Sued" or "south" in German, but it was indeed Bruxelles-Midi. Just before the train was ready for departure to Paris, we jumped out.

Finding the hostel wasn't too difficult, although nobody knew the street we were looking for. The place is nice, actually a private apartment with a guest room with four beds. Tonight we share the room with two guys from Swissm using a mixture of German, French and English. After checking in, we went for a walk through a park to the Basilica d'Elizabeth nearby. Walking towards it, we realized its sheer size - and even better, it had an illuminated red cross on top! Perhaps it was sponsored by a South Korean (churches over there always have that kind of a cross), on the backside we saw that one of the windows had a Korean map and the flag. We'll check it out tomorrow again since it was already closed tonight.

I can't wait for the Korean breakfast tomorrow morning...

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11, 2005 at 7/11/2005 11:42:00 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.