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- Written by Tom Snow
After a year and a half living in Germany, I really felt I should exhaustively write out all my observations on life over here. Overall, I've really loved it, and while there's been a lot of culture shock, there's also been more moments than I can count in which I've thought "why can't we have anything like this back in the States?" Before moving here, I was in San Antonio, Texas for eight years, and before that, spent various stages of life moving between three coasts and a few other points far from any coast.
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- Written by Tom Snow
When I last left off, I had just gone through security at Bruxelles-Midi train station, walked across a line marked "UK Border" and gotten my passport stamped by British customs agents. When I finally got through all that business and boarded the Eurostar, I found that there was assigned seating. I just took a seat I thought looked appealing, as if I were on the ICE, until the people who already had that seat bumped me out, and pointed on my ticket where my seat number is. Remember this if you ever book travel on the Eurostar!
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- Written by Tom Snow
It was noon on Sunday, December 16, 2018 when the second third of this adventure began. I had just boarded a train to Brussels which took off from Amsterdam Centraal station. This was another slow train, an IC (InterCity) which was just like the EC that I had been on the afternoon before. It took something like four hours to get me to its destination, the train station underneath Brussels Airport. You know, even though my ticket was only good up to the airport, I probably could've stayed on all the way to one of the stations further in the city like Midi without getting caught. After about 20 minutes waiting for a downtown bus I started to regret not doing that. But eventually that bus showed up and started slowly and painfully carrying me downtown as the sun quickly set and I started to realize that I was not going to be able to hit up any of the photogenic spots in this city, like the Atomium and Manneken Pis, on this trip.
- Details
- Written by Tom Snow
It was December of 2018 when, not even two months after moving to Germany, I decided to take a few days vacation before Christmas and do a short backpacking expedition. This whole trip was hastily cobbled together at the last minute; originally I was going to visit my parents over Christmas and stop in Amsterdam on the way, but when they told me I didn't need to visit since they're so out of the way for me now, I still wanted to drop by Amsterdam and so planned a different trip involving that city. I wanted to visit the UK and get some of that English brown ale I liked so much, and I knew that it was possible to ride a train through the Chunnel, and after learning that such a train ride would depart from Brussels, the itinerary became Amsterdam-Brussels-London. While buying the tickets I may have given the departure and arrival times some cursory glances, but was more interested in the prices, honestly. And it was my desire to be cheap that led me to get rooms in hostels, something I'd never done before.
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