Bruges; Friday, 19 December, 2008

Having bumped into a friend at St Pancras station and had a spot of lunch with them, I was feeling quite full by the time I passed through security into the depressing departures lounge at the Eurostar terminal, still harking back to the glory days of Waterloo.

A couple of minutes early they announced the boarding of my train, and as usual with Eurostar, everyone rushed to the gates, despite everyone having a pre-confirmed seat. Given that, without noticing, I was standing right next to the access ramp to my train I was one of the first on, and it became obvious quite quickly why everyone was rushing. The train was going to be full, in fact it was getting so full that the train manager was making regular pleas for people to stop putting anything other than massive luggage in the luggage racks and if it could fit into the luggage shelf above your seat you had to put it there. They were getting very jumpy about bags being left in the vestibules, and to some extent you could understand why. Just a couple of months previously there had been another big fire in the channel tunnel. Once again, nobody had died, but the damage had been massive, but there were concerns about people escaping from full trains.

The fire had also meant that my train was going to take longer and stop less often. Rather than a stop in Ashford, and another one in Lille, today it was fast to Brussels. Albeit that it took nearly double the time to go through the tunnel at what can’t have been much over 30 miles an hour. It felt more like a tube train than the greatest revolution in British rail travel!

Arriving in Brussels at the height of the evening rush hour, on a Friday, the last Friday before Christmas, was always going to be a little fraught. Last year when I did it I had only to get across the city to my hotel. Today I was heading back out of Brussels and into Flanders. I wandered up to the platform for my train, which arrived five minutes later bursting at the seams.

It was quite clear that a large contingent of my Eurostar were doing exactly the same as me, going to Bruges, and as most of them were British. My suspicions were confirmed when, en mass, and without actually saying anything, agreed that compared to a British evening train this service was empty and could easily take a couple of hundred more people and luggage.

In the end I had to stand all the way to Ghent were about half the train got off, and then had a set for the final 30 minutes to Bruges. From the station I wandered over to my hotel, checked in and then headed out for a wander around the city at night.

When I had come to Bruges in 2004 it had been on a day trip from Brussels, and at the height of the tourist season so the city was heaving and it was difficult to see anything. In late December the city, whilst still busy, isn’t as impossibly packed, and at night is possibly more beautiful that it is during the day.

Having had a long wander around, and a short stop in the Christmas market for a splash of hot wine and a braatwort (Flemish Bratwurst), I headed back to the hotel for some sleep.