This morning I had the hostel's "full English breakfast", which was hugely disappointing. It gave me the opportunity to try beans on toast, at least, but I come away from that experience no more understanding of why anyone would put beans on their toast. It's not actively bad, but when there are so many actively good things that one can put on toast, why beans? I suppose if the alternative is marmite... Anyway, I left for Buckingham Palace after this to try and occupy myself with the inconvenient window of time before my train left for Brussels. It was predictably uninteresting, especially since they weren't changing the guard for whatever reason today. The grounds were nice though, as I've come to expect, and I found they had a rather tasteful memorial to the Canadian casualties of WWII. I then waited a couple of hours back at the hostel until maybe an hour before my train departed to allow myself time to deal with customs. Customs didn't really give me any problems themselves, but it turns out that the ticketing infrastructure doesn't know how to handle my Eurail pass properly, since the emails I'd received didn't contain any of the relevant boarding info. I had to wait in line for half an hour before someone could help me (once there it took maybe 90 seconds), which cut extremely close to departure time. In line a guy tried to convince me to stop by Ukraine on my travels to help with the war effort; when I pointed out that even the safe parts of Ukraine get bombed periodically he shrugged it off as being no more dangerous than the immigrants that currently plague the streets of England ("They don't have any of those in Ukraine!" he said triumphantly, as if the lack of immigration to Ukraine is the result of some brilliant border policy).

The train ride was fine. I don't know why, but I'd hoped that the chunnel would be interesting. At least from the perspective of a rider, it very much isn't - you're unceremoniously plunged into black for about 20 minutes and then just as unceremoniously withdrawn from it. I did have some excellent in seat entertainment, however, in the form of a very elderly passenger getting upset with a slightly less elderly passenger for swearing and threatening to report him to the authorities for his language. The swearer pretended not to hear him at first and continued his phone conversation until the old guy took something he'd said on the phone as an admission of guilt, at which point he attacked old guy for wearing a West Ham hat. I didn't really get the reference here, but some of the other passengers laughed so I'm guessing there's some degree of irony to it.

Brussels is really beautiful, at least in the older sections. As soon as I found myself downtown, I was amazed by how quintessentially European it feels. I think this is what I was missing from London - in Brussels it's extremely obvious how this city grew out of a small medieval settlement. The streets are largely tiny and cobbled, and much of the inner city is completely inaccessible to cars. It's a city that's so incredibly pro-walking/public transit, a car would be almost useless. It's really not large at all - probably a similar size to Edinburgh if not a little smaller - but the public transit is simply astonishing. It not only has an incredible system of trams that run regularly and cover most of the city, but a full blown metro underneath it all. The busses that they have on top of this just feel like gilding the lily. The metro has a nasty habit of deciding not to read my card when I try to leave, however, which has caused problems. At one point this guy saw me struggling from the other side, reached through the bars to pull some switch, and clearly expected me to do something else to get through. I had no idea what he wanted, though, and I just stood there as an alarm began to sound. He frantically did something else because I evidently wasn't getting the memo on his first attempt, and after a few moments of other passengers yelling at me in their native tongues the gates opened and I went through. Later on I was alone and had no choice but to climb over the whole gate to get out; I otherwise would have been locked in. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here, but I'm really not sure what it might be. I also had an awkward moment where I stood confusedly staring at an escalator that was neither moving nor out of service. Apparently, Belgian escalators don't move unless prompted by holding your hand over the light built into the front of them.

The hostel is nice. It's right near downtown, and I only have 3 roommates rather than the 20 I've been becoming accustomed to. We even have our own bathroom. The water is still gross though, as it was in London, and I'd kill for some Quabbin right now. I checked off Moules-frites today, which served as dinner. It was pretty good, and my dining experience was enhanced by the absolutely enormous cat that became extremely interested in me once the seafood was served. Based on his stomach diameter, he seems to be having remarkable success with this approach. Off to Bruges first thing tomorrow morning. I've discovered the hostelworld social networking functions and I'm very intrigued by them - they may give me routes to meeting people even if the hostels don't organize any events themselves.