Tuesday - Manchester to Brussels
I don't need to say anything about flying from Terminal 3 in Manchester do I? It wasn't anywhere near as bad as it has been in the past thankfully, especially considering somehow we had planned this trip in the summer holidays (blame Malkmus!) - our flight wasn't delayed and we breezed through security. Someone in the village told me they prefer to drive to Leeds to avoid Manchester Terminal 3 - certainly something I thought about in the hellish depths of our journey to Porto earlier in the year.
We arrived at Brussels airport at the scheduled time, then headed out to look for the bus into the city centre. The arrivals side was quite busy, and quite a few people huddled around a street food stand, so we joined them and bought some hot hot chips - actually the best chips I think I've ever had. Big splodge of Mayonnaise too, perfect. The bus into Brussels was supposed to take an hour but took much less than that - we bought tickets beforehand from a little booth at the terminal. Once at the bus station we took a train from the Central train station to the Midi and then walked about 10 minutes to our hotel. We were all checked in by around 6pm.
When booking hotels I tried to keep the costs down, so we didn't stay anywhere fancy, but tried to balance cost/ location and reviews. Although a lot of reviewers seem to be on the unhinged & demanding side at times, it is good to get a sense of the types of things people complain about and consider if that is the kind of thing you care about, or not. I didn't add breakfast at any place as it's usually easy to find some breakfast when you're walking around a place - I had no regrets about that!
Our first hotel was The Hotel Hubert Grand Place. It is quite a trendy/ opulent looking hotel with plush seating in reception and some quirky branding which attempts to make it friendly - kind of like Hubert is a person. That aside, it was a lovely spot, and we had a very friendly concierge who gave us a free florentine while we waited to check in.
We went out to eat in Brussels, choosing somewhere both James and I had happened upon in our research:
Cafe Novo. It was somewhere where it was stated you could get some traditional food - James had
Carbonnades - a delicious beef in ale stew and I had
Stoemp - sausages with potato & root veg mash. James also had a beer from Grosse Bertha - a Belgian Brewer. We sat outside! That is still a thing in late October somehow - it was nowhere near cold and after all day cooped up it felt like a good thing to be doing.
Language-wise in Brussells most people spoke to us in French or English, which I could cope with. As usual if I spoke French most people reply to me in English but it feels like a good thing to try!
We slept really well at Hubert's Place - he was a good host! I would definitely recommend it. It was our first go at unpacking and repacking our stuff too, and thankfully everything went back in easily.
Wednesday - Brussels to Hamburg
We were up early to Brussels Midi to get to the Centrale station. The journey was Brussels -> Cologne (Koln) ->Hamburg HBF but things didn't exactly go according to plan. We bought coffee and a croissant at the station and then headed for our train. The station is huge and lacking in signage but we worked out where we needed to be - our train was late, then it moved platform at the last minute. We followed our fellow travellers to that train and ran onto the train on the platform. We found our carriage and seats, to find a man sitting in one of them. We showed him our reservation and he said, "it says these are unreserved.." another man who had just got on supposed perhaps the reservations were wrong as his said the same. Our Seat Guy moved to another seat and I pulled up the route on my phone. As the train pulled out I realised in a panic we were on the wrong train. Of course it was nothing to really panic about, it was all sortable but the thought of the lost time and potentially lost money made me feel a bit sick.
We got off the train at Dusseldorf, crucially without Our Seat Guy knowing that we'd turfed him out for no reason, and headed back to Cologne. At the station we had some funny encounters with some staff which resulted in our reservation for our journey just being changed at no cost. Amazing. We got some interesting looking but ultimately dry and uninspiring baked goods to try as at this point we'd managed to fanny around in the wrong direction until lunchtime. When we got back on the right train though, we noticed the first stop was Dusseldorf (before heading off in a different direction than the original train) and we both started laughing maniacally - it was really quite difficult to stop.
So we arrived in Hamburg later than expected, but we were in the right place! Our accommodation was in walkable distance from the train station - the
My Place Hotel in Schanzenviertel. I had managed to not to take in all of the instructions for checking in, but we found eventually our key was in a locked box and had a code to retreive it. The room was basic but well appointed, and the bed was comfy and the shower good - which sometimes is all you really want. It could have felt cosier - the floor was plastic/ lino - but ultimately it easy to see that it was v clean.
I'll save more about Hamburg for the next post - we stayed there for two nights so had a full day to explore, which we took full advantage of...
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