I had printed out walking directions (well, I hadn’t printed any of the individual directions, just the overview googlemap with the suggested root outlined.) It was a little under 12 kilometers from the airport to the bus station, where I was hoping to get a luggage locker. I figured I could just use the map, get my bearings in the sky, and walk generally in the right directions until arriving at the Gare de Noord, where my bus would be leaving from at 8:45 PM.
Even if I were the most competently trained scout, there was no sun available for identifying the morning’s southeast; I only saw the sun for about 20 minutes in the course of my day-long walk through Brussels.
I started going South from the airport and ended up in the Zaventum neighborhood, which was a little bit East out of the way, but I figured I could rectify that by turning right at some point. I wandered confusedly behind an old woman, turning my map around and pausing at the circle, until she showed concerned and I asked her the direction of Gare de Noord. She gave me directions to the train, though I thought I was saying I wanted to walk (I was saying “Je veux promener” and later persons asking what I was up to corrected that to “Je vais a pied”). The very nice older lady led me all the way to the Zaventum train station, and showed me the office where I could buy a ticket. On the walk there, I decided that I should probably give up my foolish walking plan, as it was already a silly idea and an even worse idea if I didn’t take the help offered by this very helpful woman.
At Gare de Noord, I left my luggage in a locker and went out to see the city!
Ever since we did a unit on Belgium in high school French, I have wanted to go to the Comic Strip museum in Brussels.
I only ended up spending about 2 hours in the comic book museum. The best part were the statues of famous comic book characters that I got my picture with.
Recognize this one?
There was a terribly small and simple exhibit on the history of the comic strip, beginning with the cave painting. Then there was a whole gallery of 200 original pages of comic books by various authors, rotated regularly. This period’s exhibit was on animals. They only had one page of a superhero comic from the states, a page from an old John Buscema Spider-man where he is fighting the Lizard. The next exhibit was on Belgian comic book authors; a short biography, examples of their work, and commentaries on periods in their work and how their areas of focus/storylines/characters changed throughout their careers.
I took a break from the museum to eat lunch and decided to go and see the EU and other Brussels government buildings, which turned out to be quite fancy.I returned to the Gare de Noord at around 7 PM, after visiting the Brussels Info Place (bip), walking down the Rue de Loi, through the Jubel/Centenaire Park and a huge arch. The "arc de triomphe" pictured below was dedicated in 1905. You can also get an idea of the threatening weather that fortunately only threatened me the entire day.
I went immediately to reclaim my luggage, and found that the locker was unlocked and the door ever so slightly ajar! Praise God, so far I haven’t noticed that anything was stolen (or anything creepy added to it); the door probably popped open on its own as many of the lockers were malfunctioning. I suggest that you be very suspicious of your own travel-locker services, as I hopefully will be in the future.
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