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- Written by Tom Snow
Wednesday, July 17, 2019. Today's bus wasn't leaving until 1pm, so with several hours to kill, I decided this would be a good morning to hit up the Atomium. I had totally missed this, and just about everything else in Brussels, the last time I rolled through which was last December. Getting there took awhile, though, because Belgium's S-train is not quite as user-friendly as Germany's S-Bahn. Unlike the S-train I rode to Schaerbeek two days earlier, the ones that were coming through on that morning were not marked in any way, and after taking a quick glance at the timetable, another quick glance at Google Maps, I quickly jumped aboard a train with a final destination south of the city, wrongly thinking it was going through Central and Midi stations. Nope! It was going south in a roundabout way, completely avoiding downtown. I had to hop off at the next stop, and ride another train to Bruxelles-Schuman, a little east of downtown, near some EU buildings.
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- Written by Tom Snow
I woke up that morning feeling the dreaded after-effect of having had too much to drink the night before. And so I decided it would be a good idea to avoid alcohol that day.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019 was to be the first day of our Belgian Journey in which we would get to tour Bruges.
I got picked up at the hostel at 10am. The bus ride was painfully long, but fortunately was the longest of the trip since Bruges was the furthest destination from Brussels of all the cities we visited. First, it was just me and three Floridians I had met the night before. Then the double-decker bus stopped at a hotel downtown and filled up.
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- Written by Tom Snow
Tomorrowland! I'd been waiting for this all year ever since I finagled my ticket back in January. Once I moved here last year, I knew from right then I'd have to go to Tomorrowland, and I knew that it was going to sell out crazy fast, which is why on the first (and only) day of sales, I was on their website, which was swamped with thousands of people like me accessing it from all over the world, frantically trying to get my ticket before everything sold out.
Because of this slight desperation, I didn't fully pay attention to the available options and thus didn't notice that there was camping available. And so I took the cheapest hotel option: a hostel called the "Train Hostel." Also, despite usually being a penny pincher I decided this was an acceptable "treat yourself" moment and so also bought the "Belgian Journey," tours of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp in the week before the festival.
Read more: Tomorrowland day 1 - Getting there & Welcome Drink
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- Written by Tom Snow
The second half of this trip begins as I leave Maastricht on a train bound for Liège...
Saturday 22 June
And now it was a short hop to Liège on an SNCB train. SNCB is the Belgian national carrier, and I don't think they maintain their trains quite as well as DB or NS. It would be an exaggeration to call this train a "rickety old box" but the fact that it had graffiti all over it doesn't exactly make it a good representative for SNCB. Anyway, it did its job, which was to take me to Liège, so I can't complain.
Liège is a small city in the French-speaking part of Belgium. I didn't have enough time to explore it, only an hour between trains. All I could do was walk out of the station, down one street where I could look at several bars, restaurants, and shops but not stop in them, and then turn around and go back.
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