Bruges

Bruges (pron: Broojsh) is an hour's train ride from Brussels, affording me an opportunity to see some of the countryside, and the rural towns that we passed along the way.

The Bruges train station is a modern Art Deco-ish structure at the edge of the town. There were buses into town, but I opted to walk, as most tourists seemed to do. The medieval township has retained its old-worlde feel, with winding cobbled streets, low-rise shoppes, two huge towering cathedrals, and several large old buildings that now house museums. Bruges is situated on a series of canals and islands, which are used to ferry boatloads of tourists on tours.

The town's services seem to be structured around tourism. I wasn't expecting to see a Marriot, nor the expensive prices that abounded. The town is quaint, and a lovely way to spend an afternoon, or longer as I inferred from conversations at neighbouring tables. But it's almost a victim of itself, or at least the service providers, and the tourist-trap odor is hard to ignore. On more than one occasion I felt like I had wandered into Ye Old Euro-Worlde in a theme park.

After Bruges, I caught a train back to Brussels for dinner, then rushed back to Bruxelles-Midi station to catch the last Eurostar back to London-Waterloo. The train is under the Channel Tunnel at the moment, a twenty-minute trip that evokes mixed emotions of thrill and anxiety. I'm no expert on these matters, but security doesn't seem sufficiently tight to safeguard against an 'incident' on a high-exposure target like the Channel Tunnel. I know that sounds paranoid, and it is, but it's also a fair assessment of the minimal checks that screen baggage and passengers. Warner Brothers put me through me more stringent checks to review Matrix Revolutions prior to its release!!

On a happier note, the Eurostar service trip has been particularly pleasant. My first thoughts on Friday night were that the Eurostar isn't as smooth as Japan's Shinkansen, but that has more to do with the sub-standard tracks arond London. The English side of the network has always been the weakest link. While we've sped through Belgium and France at speeds up to 300 km/hour, the train crawls into, and out of, London on pre-Eurostar tracks that are shared with other mainline services. That will change in 2007. A high-speed track is being tunneled under London to St Pancras station, a beautiful Gothic-styled, red-brick structure, reminiscient of Brisbane's old museum. The restored St Pancras will become the new London terminus, and the high-speed track will shave twenty minutes off all Eurostar services!