If It Feels Good Do It

In three days I’ve slept a total of nine hours.

I hear a clock chime off in the distance. It’s not the Westminster chimes though. Something else. From my hotel room window I can see the front of the Bruxelles Center train station. A bunch of people walk quickly in front of it, busy with their morning. The window is open, and it’s cold.

I’ll go put on a sweatshirt.

My sweatshirt smells remarkably a lot like cigarette smoke.

It’s now 8:45 a.m. on Monday morning. At 3:30 p.m. I’ll fly to England.

It’s hard to remember exactly what I did and in what order since I arrived, but I’ll write down the more notable impressions.

First, and most importantly, I really like the people here. They are more laid-back than other places I’ve been in Europe. Well, they are definitely more laid-back than the tea drinking snobs over in England.

Friday morning when I arrived, Guy was there at the airport to pick me up. Pick me up in the urban sense, I mean. We got on a train and took it to central Brussels.

My hotel is about a one minute walk from the train station, and Guy lives about a one minute walk from my hotel.

The food here is great. We sat on the street and had a huge bucket of mussels the first night. Last night we had ribs.

There were a lot of Americans at the ribs place, but overall I haven’t seen too many Americans here.

As is usual in many large European cities, the girls here don’t like American guys. Or, maybe they just don’t like me. Or if they do, they don’t want to admit it. I discussed all this with Guy and a new friend I made named Toby, who is one of Guy’s friends.

I told Toby a pick-up line I could use, all delivered with a southern U.S. accent. “Hey, do you like American dudes? How do you feel about cheap beer, four-wheel drive, and concealed handguns?”

Toby laughed and gave me the thumbs up, so I tried the line in a bar. Well, sort of.

A girl walked up to the bar where I was seated. I said to her “Hey, do you like American dudes?” No response. She was wearing this tight, black, long-sleeved designer shirt with a bunch of cloth lines sewn into it. “Is that a shirt,” I asked “or a modern-art experiment?” It was something spontaneous a la romantique that I came up with.

She either didn’t hear me, didn’t understand me, or did an amazing acting job. Everyone else thought it was hilarious though.

The bar that we were at was called Delirium. We went there a bunch of times. It was awesome. 2004 beers were available. It was in the Guinness book of world records. One of their first brews that they started out with was Delirium Tremens, hence the name of the bar.

At Delirium I got a chance to talk to another one of Guy’s friends name Keith. Keith is a software engineer and technical writer who writes creatively as a hobby. He is also into target shooting. Man, what a cool guy! He had a bunch of hilarious stories from when he visited his cousin out in Texas.

Guy and I went to the Atomium, but didn’t go inside due to hangovers and exhaustion. Instead, we just chilled outside and told jokes.

Another cool bar in Brussels that we went to was Rock Classic. Rock Classic is a bar similar to Rock Bar Mother in Tokyo, where you can sit at the bar and request music. Earlier in the evening at Rock Classic they play more classic rock, and later they play more metal.

Guy and I were at Rock Classic one night when these two Japanese women came in, who we started talking to. They both had been living in Brussels for a while, and both had kids. They loved to drink, though. At one point they said to me “the next one is on us, are you sure you’re ok?” Oh, and they also loved punk and metal. We sat there drinking and talking until about 5:30 a.m. At the end of it they thanked us for a great night. It was like they were angels. The whole experience was kind of surreal.

Related Posts

• It’s April 4th I Think