Trainspotting

If you’ve been looking through the ~150 pictures I put up on Facebook, you’ve probably guessed that I had a fantastic time on my trip to Bruges in Belgium. I’m back in Norway now, settling down from all the stress and excitement of traveling. Before coming to Norway, my main reason for not traveling was just that—the literal travel aspect of things. I’d love to go see this and that and the other thing, but I’m not a great traveler. Whenever I start making plans and realizing that those travels plans all have to interlink and overlap and become one cohesive unit, I get stressed and tend to fret about dates and times and alarm clocks not working and watching the train slip out of the station—without me on it.

For all the airports I’ve been to, I’ve almost always had someone to pick me up or drop me off at the airport. This makes things really easy, since I only have to worry about my flight that way. Being in Moss, though, I had to find my way to the Oslo-Rygge airport (I ended up taking a cab); then, once I had flown from Oslo-Rygge to the Brussels-Charleroi airport, I had to find my way from Charleroi to Brussels, which is an hour south of Brussels and the main train-hub in Belgium. I did my research and found a shuttle bus that took me straight to the Brussels-Midi train station, so that wasn’t really so bad.

As I looked around the Brussels-Midi train station, I couldn’t find any train officials to actually get a ticket to Bruges. I found an information desk, but plastered across the front was a large, handwritten sign (written hastily by an annoyed employee, I assume) which read, “NO INFORMATION ABOUT TRAINS.” It seems odd to put an information desk in a train station that has no information about trains, but hey, it’s Europe—what do I know.

In the Brussels-Midi, they don’t have any officials selling tickets that I saw, but they had touchscreen kiosks that printed tickets for you. The machines would only take a credit card with a microchip in it (whereas most American cards still have the magnetic strip you have to swipe), or the machines would take cash, but only in the form of Euro coinage. I went to a few different stores in the train station and broke down some Euro bills, and I finally had enough coins to buy a ticket to Bruges. I entered my departing station and my arriving station, and the machine spit out a ticket that didn’t have a train time on it.

The odd thing I found out about the trains in Europe is that you can hop on any train bound for your destination after you buy a ticket, no matter what time of day it is. So long as the date is correct on the train ticket, you can take any train to the arriving station. In North Dakota, the train only comes through twice, one eastbound, the other westbound; in this scenario, there really isn’t any worry about train times, since you always know that the train will be there sometime, late or not. If you miss it, you miss it, and you come back tomorrow and try again.

Because I couldn’t find what time the train left, I had to start looking at the screens hanging in the station. Just like at the airport, the screens scroll through which trains are arriving, which ones are departing, what times the trains get in and what times they leave, and what platform each specific train is at. As I looked at the screen, I had this horrifying feeling. I couldn’t see Bruges on any of the signs. I started looking at the walls of the station to find the train times when a French couple came up to me and blathered off a question about a train stop, to which I had no reply. I searched the memory banks of my brain for anything French that I could remember. Oui—no, don’t give them hope. Omelette du fromage—no, how does that help? I’ve got it! “Parlez vous anglais?” They replied with a curt “No” and walked away, but just after that, I found my train to Bruges.

My dealings with Amtrak have apparently ruined me, as I only think of trains in terms of my point of departure and my point of arrival. Believe it or not, the trains still run when I’m not on them. All the trains listed on the posters in the station had the very first and very last stations on them, meaning that my stops were probably going to be somewhere in the middle of the train’s route. I found a train from Brussels-Midi to Oostende, and Bruges was the stop right before Oostende and the end of the line. As I climbed the stairs to get onto the platform, the train screeched to a halt and the doors whooshed open, so I jumped inside, sat down, and pulled my hat low just in case it was the wrong train. In a little over an hour, I was in Bruges, and the train station was a two-minute walk from the hotel.

The biggest issue of the trip was the languages. I’ve been in in Norway for almost two full months now, and I’ve started retraining myself to automatically try and think in Norwegian when I get lost and see road signs. This didn’t work in Belgium, obviously—the country is surrounded by different languages: German, French, and Dutch. Furthermore, I was in a tourist town, so the people who were there were from all over Europe. I did run into a few English speakers, but they were few and far between. The people at the hotel and the museums were generally fluent in English, since they’re used to speaking to travelers. Going to restaurants was always difficult, though, unless they had pictures of the food on the menu. When servers came by to take my order and asked what I’d like, I mostly said, “Yes, please,” trying to tap into my adventurous side. 

Getting from Bruges to Brussels to the Charleroi airport on the way back wasn’t nearly as difficult as I imagined it would be. I looked online to buy shuttle bus tickets from Brussels-Midi to Charleroi airport, and from the website I was looking at, it seemed like that was the only option to get tickets. I planned to leave Bruges on the 6:30 A.M. train back to Brussels, but I decided that it would be better to have a little more “uh oh” time in case I couldn’t get a ticket to Charleroi and had to work out other options; I ended up leaving Bruges at 5:36 A.M. As soon as I hit the Brussels-Midi station at about 6:30, I hoofed it to the other end of the station and caught the 6:40 bus to Charleroi airport, and I was sitting in the terminal by 7:45, a whopping four-hour wait before my plane departed.

By the time I made it back to Norway yesterday, I was exhausted, but I never did take a nap. I just went through the rest of my day and went to bed at the normal time. I slept in this morning, but I knew I didn’t have to be anywhere today. Overall, it was an awesome trip, but the traveling still gets me pretty wound up.