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For this weekend a group of people from Schlumberger went on a trip to Brussels in Belgium. We traveled by train on the Saturday morning and back on Sunday night, the journey time was only about 1.5 hours each way and cost about 70 Euros. (70 Euros of which I intend on getting back from the company). Our RMC class is 10 people but only 6 of us went to Belgium this weekend, the others were feeling too lazy to go that far. We stayed in a Youth Hostel called "Sleep Well", it was ok although they didn't provide towels !! I even have a special travel towel which I left in France.
The majority of both days was spent walking around Belgium with our overambitious tour guide in the form of Chum. We saw pretty much everything from the European Parliament buildings to the Manneken Pis. As usual we went into a fair few churches, Mcdonalds and took lots of pictures. But unlike our normal trips we also ate a many waffles, a couple of the more extravagant ones are shown below. On the Saturday night we were dragged into a free Opera place where they were screening some Opera film about a flute (The Magic Flute). It was about some people in a war and luckily it was in English, unfortunately I could only understand about half of what they were singing and I feel asleep a couple of times :-) After about an hour and a half of torture we decided to leave and not see the end, it was getting late and everyone was very hungry. At about 12 most of us headed back to the hostel and the rest tried to find a night club. Just as the trip was finishing and we got off the train in "Marne La Valle" one of our group was stopped by French security forces. There were numerous soldiers with rifles, it was the only customs between the two countries we saw and they didnt even look at my passport. The guy who was stopped and searched just happened to be from Saudi Arabia, luckily a couple of us waited with him, otherwise you just dont know what the French would have done. This is the clearest case of racial profiling I have ever seen :-) |