Dash to Brussels

Since I moved to London I am behind on my blogging. Below you'll find a post I meant to publish in December 2007.

After having lived in London for 2.5 months and getting sick of the dreadful raining, in December I discovered one of the definite perks of living in one of Europe's largest hubs. The new St. Pancras International train station at King's Cross, only 15-20 min on the Piccadilly Line from where I live at Earls Court, hosts Eurostar with fast direct trains under the English Canal to Brussels and Paris.

I made a spontaneous last-minute decision to dash to Brussels to see my good friend Alex. I got a return ticket for £139, left my apartment one hour before the train departed, and the train ride to Brussels took less than two hours. Great!

We went for dinner with a bunch of Alex's friends and a drink after dinner at gay Olivier's fabulous 3-storey apartment. On Sunday Alex and I went to see a piece of land on which he and his girlfriend are going to build a house.

We also went to see the Atomium, Brussel's response to Paris's Eiffel Tower, or so they say. Built for the 1958 Expo and Brussels World’s Fair, the Atomium was a quite cool construction. As you can see from the pictures, the Atomium was built like a huge molecule. There were escalators and an elevator inside the "molecular bindings" and different exhibition displays inside each of the atoms.

The sunny weather suddently turned into pouring rain so we had to run back to the car, and it put an effective stop to our sightseeing.