I admit it: I wasn't expecting much of Brussels. It was basically a place where I had to be on May 15 to catch a plane home. In fact I'd extended my stay in Luxembourg another day because I didn't figure Brussels would be very interesting.

And I don't beat myself up too bad for being wrong about that, because it was what several experienced Euro-travelers had told me.

Let me tell you: Brussels is, as Don Cornelius would say, a stone gas.

It took me all morning to get there; the train was slow and stopped at every obscure stop. And got held up; they were doing some work on the track or something. I have to say the Belgian railroad system didn't impress me greatly; I kept expecting to hear somebody speaking Catalan.

On the other hand I did get to see quite a bit of Belgian back country, which on the whole was really beautiful, the Ardennes especially: hills and woods, the scene of the last great German offensive of World War II and some brutal fighting as the Americans struggled to hold the line. You could imagine this would have been a bad place to fight a war, especially in the winter. Not that there are any good places for that.

It took me almost no time to find a room in Brussels; walking away from the station almost at random, lacking a map, I happened to walk right onto a little square lined with hotels. Most were impossibly expensive but there was a little place, the Hotel Eperonniers, just off the square, with one room-and-bath left.

As a glance at the left of the photo will show, there was another kind of crowd on hand too:

Which of course explained it all; there was a big soccer game and therefore a distinct possibility of the fans taking the town apart. I made sure I knew the way back to the hotel, and considered other possible escape routes if the shit hit the fan.

It was a fine afternoon for cruising the streets, drinking Stella Artois (my whole-world favorite beer; I'd already made its acquaintance in France) from cans bought at little hole-in-the-wall stores, watching the tourists and the locals, always something to see:

Mussels are the famous Brussels specialty and I'd been advised not to miss them. For once popular advice was right; the mussels in Brussels are...there ought to be a rain-in-Spain joke here; "are so good you'll do the hustle," OK, OK, never mind. But they really were delicious, served in their shells in a kind of soup with celery and other seasonings, in a huge crockery pot with a big order of fries on the side. The café didn't have Stella Artois but they had Jupiler, also excellent (being Belgian, after all), and I went through quite a few of those too.

Toward the end I got into a conversation in Spanish with a couple of young girls, not much more than teenagers, who were sitting at the next table. They were from some place near Madrid; they were interested to hear that I'd recently been to Girona, where neither of them had ever been. "Gerona," they called it, and giggled when I remarked that they better not do that around Catalans; "Ah, Catalans," they said, and rolled their eyes.

Up in my room a little later, I thought about the last events of the day: here I am in Brussels and I got some money from my bank in Oklahoma and then had dinner sitting next to a couple of girls from Spain. And they could as easily have been Italian or German or Arab or for that matter Chinese...the world was indeed changing very fast; the old national labels didn't seem to mean as much. At least around here, though in some parts of the world, according to the news on the room's little TV set, people were still killing each other over incomprehensible and seemingly trivial distinctions.

But I had had too many Jupilers to be much good at Deep Thoughts just now, and I fell asleep without reaching any conclusions....

Next morning I went down to the same café and yes, by God, I had Belgian waffles. With strawberries. The best strawberries I ever tasted.

Then I walked over and sat on a bench on the little square for an hour or so, watching people hurrying past on their way to work or school or whatever; and finally I shouldered my pack and set off up the hill to the station to catch the train to the airport.