England To Belgium; My Night in Brussels

After writing my London post, I had a leisurely brunch with Lucy, packed up my clean clothes, and took some public transit toward a place in the southeast reaches of London called Mottingham, whose name absolutely sounds made up. There’s a gas station there that hitchhikers like to hitch from to get towards the tunnel and ferries at Dover. I must have lost my marker on Stonehenge day, so I wasn’t able to make a sign, but it worked out okay. A guy named Simeon, in casual business attire and a blue SUV, picked me up in minutes.

Simeon has lived in several countries and traveled through dozens more. Now he’s in his 50s, and looking younger, but he freshly remembers htiching around Europe and is eager to help travelers. He took me a few miles out of town, to a spot where I got another lift from Peter, an older guy with a big ol’ belly who decided to take me all the way to the service station before the Channel Tunnel, which was exactly my goal. His interest in my travels mostly revolved around how much sex he hoped I was having, a topic he circled back to several times in the most disappointingly crude ways. Peter is a prime example of people whom I’d be pretty quick to judge if not for the immense generosity they showed to me as a hitchhiker. He was a little evasive about his original destination, but he definitely went out of his way for me.

I was hungry, so I had some truck-stop fast-food Chinese, a decision I would thoroughly regret that evening. I had to wait a little while at the service station exit, but a lift came, a really good one. It was two Englishwomen, a college-age girl at the wheel and a young mother in the passenger seat. They’d met for the first time only minutes before, and they were heading to the ferry that would take their car from Dover to Calais, where they were signed up to volunteer for the week. Calais has a lot of refugees, and they just keep coming, hoping to illegally smuggle their way across the channel into the UK. The women didn’t know how they would be put to use yet. I admire them. There was supposed to be a third volunteer in the car, but she’d bailed at the last minute, so they actually had an extra ticket that would have gone to waste. And that’s how I got across the English Channel for free.

Maybe I didn’t see the right parts of it, but Calais seemed like kind of a dump, a run-down stopover built around the ferry system. Lodging was stupidly expensive, but it was getting too late to hitch out, and I’d read about shantytowns of refugees being broken up regularly by police on the town’s outskirts, so I didn’t feel great about camping. My mom had offered to cover the cost of a few hotels if it was ever an issue of safety, so I decided to let her help me out this time – not that I couldn’t afford it, but because knowing that that was on the table kept me from waffling about the decision too much. If not for the issue of safety, I’d have probably slept outside someplace and saved the Euros for when they’d be better spent, in better company.

The hotel room was smelly and dark and covered in black mold. The TV didn’t work, and in the bathroom, perched on the radiator, were two nearly exhausted spools of pink toilet paper; barely enough. The only hostel in Calais was booked up with volunteers, last minute Couchsurfing requests hadn’t come through, and for some reason AirBnB was running really slowly on my phone, so this was the cheapest option. I knew what I was getting into.

In the morning I walked a lot, my first destination an international truck stop that Hitchwiki had recommended in years past. Now it was swarming with refugees, African and Middle Eastern, milling about or sitting quietly. It was eerie, but I didn’t feel unsafe – there was a huddle of police around something when I first arrived – it was just disconcerting to be around so much silent, anxious desperation.

That was at the northeast end of Calais. I walked another hour or so to the southeast edge of town, where another good hitching spot was supposed to be, and when I finally got there, I quickly found a lift from Erik, a German truck driver with American parents who was going all the way to Trier, in Germany, far to the east. I wanted to go north after getting out of France. Luckily, he meant to go through Brussels, a city I was interested in. He bought me a coffee at a gas station on Brussels’ outskirts, and from there I thumbed my way into the city center with Marc, and older Belgian academic type, an art historian and teacher. He offered me some fresh cherries and left me near the city center with a big bottle of water.

Brussels is a beautiful city, its central area all vast, ornate facades with turrets and spires. Belgium’s persona us strange, a mishmashed overlap of Dutch and French, with Brussels right in the middle of it. With my limited knowledge and research, the main attraction for me was the snacks – fries and waffles of the most perfect texture, with so many varieties of flavors and toppings. In my less than 24 hours in Brussels I had each thing twice. That’s pretty much all I ate in Brussels, actually – waffles and fries. Maybe not a great lifestyle, but a delicious visit.

Busking went really well for me that night. One doesn’t expect a lot from a Tuesday night busk, but I found a nice quiet corridor with steady foot traffic, where my music resonated really nicely, and I made a good 50 Euros, more than enough to cover my hostel and snacks and some really crisp Belgian beer.

In the morning I took the tram to the north edge of town and waited a good while, turning down a couple short lifts, until a couple women from Antwerp picked me up. I half-dozed while they spoke merrily in Dutch in the front seat, deciding to take me a little farther than Antwerp, to a town just barely in the Netherlands. I’ll tell that story soon.

Belgium doesn’t have a strong sense of identity the way England or France does. You may not have a stereotype about Belgians. I really knew nothing about the country before being dropped off in it. To be honest, I still kind of don’t. But Brussels is beautiful, the people are nice, and the snacks are truly the topmost notch.