Still in Brussels...

I was moaning about the hotel in the last post and the fact that the computer keyboards are different here in Belgium than they are in the UK: the A key is where the Q should be and the M is where the L can be found and so on. It makes life very difficult. Let me try and give you an example:

"Noz is the ti,e for qll good ,en to co,e to the qid of the pqrty:"

That should read: "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." But I am getting used to it, although I cannot find the apostrophe key so I have to write out the word "cannot" instead and I have to write "I am" rather than the abbreviated form. It is not a major problem and the more I use this keyboard, the easier it becomes.

There is little more to say; I am used to the hotel, where the breakfast is good and the bathroom works fine, not to mention the television, which has both BBC1 and BBC2, so I cannot complain of being out of touch. Getting back to breakfast, I have made a point of having CoCo Pops everyday along with a cup of coffee. Not tea? No, because the cups are too small, which is a little annoying. I have enjoyed fresh fruit daily; yesterday I enjoyed melon and pineapple and today it was orange.Today I had a croissant too and a banana.

The hotel is a little on the noisy side. I am not sure why, but I think it has a lot to do with the acoustics of the building. Everything makes a noise louder than normal; unless it is down to the fact that my ears were recently sorted out at the surgery (I cannot use the word "doctor" in the possessive as I cannot work out how to type an apostrophe) . There is a noisy bastard in Room 108 across the hall. He is quite happy to be half dressed and have the door open as I pass and  quite happy to speak loudly with his partner or girlfriend or wife, who knows? But outside of plain noisy sons of bitches, it seems that everything makes much more noise than you might expect and by and large it goes on through the night: Somebody dragging a suitcase to his or her room seems to make one helluva noise and I can hear doors closing and children wailing and the sound of laughter; and you know what? I kind of enjoy it; there is something very friendly about this place and if, like me, you find yourself alone in a hotel room, sometimes the noise of other guests can be comforting.

I have walked everywhere and avoided taking taxis, which is a good thing. It is roughly 25 minutes to walk from where I am now to my hotel and then another 25 minutes back to Brussels railway station where I catch the train to London. Tonight I am alone, which is good. I will take an early dinner somewhere followed by a walk around and then, finally, I will stroll back to the hotel and hit the sack.

It is nearly 1500hrs and I really ought to be moving away from business centre and start to formalise some sort of plan for later: