Leaving London for Brussels on the Eurostar train (aka the “Chunnel” train) is a pretty interesting thing. First, the train is super-quiet and super-steady, unlike the noisy/shaky “tube” subway trains you take everywhere around London. Second, the train makes it way quietly out of London and through the English countryside, into a benign-looking tunnel that eventually takes the train more than 150 feet below the bottom of the English Channel! You’re in the dark tunnel for what seems like a day (but it’s only about an hour and a half), and you come out of it in France. Bada Bing, Bada Boom, you’re across the English Channel.
This is the 2nd time I’ve taken this train across (and below) the English Channel, and it still confounds me how the whole thing is possible. Yet it is. Here’s to modern engineering.
So, now I make my way to Brussels where I will continue my trek across the Old Continent. If the last five days are any indication of the tone of things to come, I gotta say it’s all quite intriguing to me.
The last couple of days and nights in London have been pretty action-packed and filled with new faces. Steffenie and I got to hang out quite a bit, and she has continued to evolve into quite the friend. I even mentioned to her that our friendship has developed quite an “edge” during this visit, which I enjoyed immensely. Seems like the cynical and acerbic sides of our senses of humors meshed quite well, and resulted in some very entertaining discussions regarding our respective “cultural” differences. I hope she enjoyed that banter as much as I did.
Same thing happened with Rosie, I got to know her quite a bit better since our time in Utila, and really enjoyed the time we spent. Her boyfriend Scott, an Aussie, turned out to be an incredibly nice guy who I’m sure to want to hang out with again somewhere and sometime soon. After meeting these people’s circle of friends, I realized that I now know so many more people in London than I did just a few days ago, which is great. I’ll need to come back in September on my way back to the states, so it’ll give me another opportunity to see these people some more before moving on. All these new people you meet along the way make a trip like this so much more interesting than looking at museums or tourist attractions, I’ve always felt that way.
Oh, and can’t forget about Maike and Juliane, two Germans I met at a hostel bar, and ended up hanging out with for a while as well. Juliane works in England as an Au pair, boning up on her English speaking abilities. Maike’s a schoolteacher who was in town for the weekend from Hamburg visiting Juliane. They were staying at a hostel around the corner from where I was staying. We ended up meeting up and hanging out at the West End one evening, then the next day we had lunch at a great Indian restaurant before they had to head out of London.
So now I’m in Belgium for a while, meeting up with yet a whole other bunch of people I know both here and in Holland. Surely I am bound to meet a whole slew of new people through them.
And that’s ok with me.