Darryl and I have birthdays quite close together, and we’re now in the habit of clubbing together and buying each other a mini break. This year our birthday treat was a long weekend in Brussels, because we both love beer and chips.
We flew from Manchester, which we will never be doing again. The hotel we stayed in the night before we flew (Manchester Airport Britannia) knocks Birmingham Apollo off the podium for the Shittest Hotel We’ve Ever Stayed At Together prize. It’s only redeeming feature was the price, which was cheaper than a mid-stay in the airport car park, and literally hundreds of people had reasoned a night there and a return Uber fare to the airport was a better option than paying for parking. Consequently, when we turned up on a Friday evening, we had to make our own parking space on the periphery of legality. Inside the hotel was phenomenal, mainly because it had been decorated in the 80s and left to rot ever since. Wall decorations were nailed to the wall to prevent theft, and there was an urn glued to the windowsill (ashes not included). Like hell were we eating at the hotel restaurant, so we ordered pizza, ate it in bed, and watched a documentary about Beverley Allit.
It was not a pleasant stay or a restful night sleep, and we were both tired and grumpy when our alarms went off at 5am. We ignored hotel convention and drove ourselves to the airport, and parked at terminal 2. Unfortunately our flight departed from terminal 3, which was 2 miles away and there are no shuttle buses connecting the two. We couldn’t get an Uber (probably because they were all at the Britannia) so got a Hackney cab, much to the drivers amusement.
We landed in Brussels, got a bus from the airport into the city centre, and found our hotel, which unfortunately appeared to be in a ghetto. There were bags of rubbish all over the pavement, accompanied by a rotten smell. Expectations of the hotel were suitably lowered, which meant we got an even better surprise when we got upgraded to a suite overlooking fountains.
We ditched our bags and went to explore the Grand Place, and were apparently the only tourists in Belgium unaware that the Tour de France was departing from Brussels that weekend. We saw the launch, and started on the beer. It probably should have been telling that TripAdvisor’s 4th Best Thing To Do In Brussels is ‘go to Luxembourg’, because we found there wasn’t much to do aside from drink and chortle over a statue of a urinating boy. We visited Delirium Cafe both nights, and on Sunday evening we stayed in our hotel bar way past closing time. Eventually we took the hint and retreated to our suite. Once back in the room, Darryl said something uncharacteristically sweet, along the lines of “I don’t ever want to be with anyone else”. I laughed and replied “well you’d better marry me then”, to which Darryl said “alright” and fell down on one knee. I hadn’t twigged that he was proposing and instead thought he’d fallen over, so I got down on the floor too, and now we’re getting married.
The next morning felt almost one night stand-ish, in that I had a hangover and the awkward task of trying to work out if the other person, in the cold light of day, wanted what had happened the night before. We gave each other the option of blaming it on beer but agreed it’d be a nice thing to do, and went ring shopping.
The flight home was delayed because of Ryanair’s cabin crews collective inability to count. After half an hour on the tarmac they announced that there was a positive discrepancy between the expected vs actual number of passengers on the plane, and between them they all got a completely different headcount. Eventually the mystery was solved: an off duty crew member had taken a spare passenger seat on the plane but confused everyone by helping with the counting but not including himself in the numbers.
We landed, got an Uber to the wrong terminal car park, and successfully gambled on Darryl’s car battery starting.
Love Emily x
