First off, why does the Belgium airport call itself the friendly airport? And the real question is why they wrote that in English. Belgium speaks French...
Regardless,
we (Tony, Nick and I) finally decided (Mon) to go to Dublin for our 5 day weekend (which began that Thursday). We first flew to Brussels. Well, that’s a loose term. We flew to Charleroi-Brussels airport, where the minimum fare for a cab out of the airport started at 20. So, not knowing what else to do, we took a taxi to our hotel, only to find out that we could have easily walked the distance. That notwithstanding, we got our rooms, put our stuff down and asked the front desk where we could get something to eat. And this will tell you where we were: he told us that the gas station about 400m (a fourth a mile) was the closest thing. Yes, we’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s not the middle of nowhere Birmingham airport, where you could walk somewhere if you want to get shot. No, this really is the middle of nowhere; I could see the airport, this gas station, about 3 hotels, and the autoroute.

Anyway, we walked to the gas station and got snacks. Nick wandered around looking for waffles (just on principle) while Renee and I searched for Belgian chocolate (what else?). When Nick saw the bag of 16 waffles, I thought he might cry; Renee found a 2 pack of chocolate that took me all of 36 hours to eat, and Tony downed a whole Powerade in about 42 seconds flat. We also found Paprika Potato chips as well as Heinz ketchup flavored chips. Three words: no thank you. That being fun, we head back to the hotel, where we spend the next 6 hours amusing ourselves. Renee’s idea: Yuker. What is Yuker, you might ask. Good question: I’m still not really sure. It seems like hearts, but you only play with cards above a 10, and the color of the suit makes a big difference in which card holds what value. It seems like a really fun game, but unfortunately for us, we only had a pencil and pieces of paper. Not very conducive to playing a card game based on suit color; makes that a tad more challenging. Also, what we didn’t really discuss until we actually played is that sometimes the Jack of a certain suit will change over and become another suit (but it changes every hand). So I’d play a diamond, but then Renee would say: “No- that’s a heart!” And we’d figure out that I just unknowingly cheated the whole hand and I’d have to go back and try to sort myself out. So confusing…

To add to all of this excitement, we begin to notice that Tony is turning purple. No lie: lips and cheeks are purple. And so I said, “Tony, take off your jacket.” But he said without the jacket, he was cold, with it he was turning purple (read: fever). [All this really happened, by the way. Not exaggerating just to make it read better]. So, let’s review, shall we? Nick has now eaten probably 10 waffles and half a pot of jam, I’ve consumed ridiculous amounts of chocolate, we just spent the last 3 hours playing a card game none of us understand while watching French teledramas, we are stuck in this room for forever, and Tony has a fever. So what do we do? What anyone in our situation would do: we ordered pizza! No really, they had told us it would take a while, so we called early.

So we called and were told it would be about an hour. Perfect. We weren’t really hungry anyway. But then we wait. And wait. And wait. For 3 hours, we sat in that room and waited for our pizza. It was ridiculous. We finally concluded that the airport has a deal with the taxi drivers and the Etap hotel has a deal with the pizza company. It’s a scam. After that, I had no idea what we did until we went to bed at 11:30, but I think I fell asleep around 2:30, (so what’s the difference anyway?) and we woke up at 4:30 to get to the airport to catch our flight. (:
So, it’s sad to say that Belgium, Brussels brings with it a large number of funny moments, and unavoidable, wonderfully hysterical frustration! And can you believe we haven’t even gotten to Ireland yet! If you thought this was adventurous/ funny/ ridiculous, you just wait. You haven’t heard anything yet!

to come: next installment- martial arts demonstration and Wonder Wall.
Then: why I will never go to Holland.