I’m always up for a trip to Belgium, as documented here before (this time last year and in pre-archive days). Last Friday, I and my usual three travelling companions set off, cheap Eurostar tickets clutched in hand, for a long weekend of Belgian fun.
Arriving in Brussels, our first stop was Beersel, in the heart of Payottenland. Our mission here was to find some genuine Lambic beers as well as having a look at a part of Belgium away from the usual lace’n'chocolate tourist trails.
After a night in Beersel (witnessing the bizarre sight of respectable middle-aged Belgians getting tipsy and dancing their butts off to a mixture of Tyrolean oompah music and cheesy Latin pop) we spent a large chunk of the next day exploring part of Payottenland. Let’s put things into geographical perspective… this is an area only 10km from the centre of a European capital city (the equivalent in London would be somewhere like Wood Green, Acton or Tooting). There are plenty of railway lines, motorways and industrial canals, just as you’d expect, but you can also see surprisingly rural scenes…
Yep, it’s a real contradiction. It’s suburbia (lots of hideous Essex-style dream homes in evidence) but it’s also countryside, and you can easily see the high-rise centre of Brussels in the distance. Typifying the rural aspect was the fact that we just couldn’t get hold of any cash. Anywhere. Presuming that, like everywhere else in Europe, we’d be able to use Visa cards in most cash machines, we hardly took any Euros with us. Big mistake. All of the cash machines we found were only suitable for Belgian bank cards. You’d never guess that there was a big European Union administrative base nearby and you’d equally never guess how little our cash opportunities improved in the heart of Brussels. More later…