I recently returned from a visit to my home town, Hamburg.....
Travelling there from Oxford by train is not really an experience I can recommend. If you insist, at least don't go via Brussels; the experience is consistently terrible. I am not maligning, I am simply stating the facts. I have done this trip via Brussels three times (return) and have had issues with the trains every single time.
My experience this time around is a good example.
I get up at 3am. I catch the bus from the competitor of my usual bus company, because my regular one (the one I have a season ticket for!) doesn't run a bus on Saturdays before 05:00, which is an outrage in and of itself. So I pay the fare for the competition bus and get the bus at 04:15.
I am at Marble Arch at 06:00, too early for the underground, hail a taxi cab, get to the Eurostar terminal at 06:15, check in and catch the train (just barely) at 06:57.
To arrive in Brussels at 10:05. To leave Brussels at 10:25.
Well, that's the theory.
The train is diverted - they have not been able to do some scheduled maintenance. Not a suicide, not a strike, nothing serious. They just didn't get around to fix the tracks. We shall be late.
But do not worry, I am assured, we shall hold the connecting train for you and the other two dozen persons who are in the same position..
At 10.26 a dozen of us rush in a mad-keen hurry across the station - no signs, no help, no nothing - to catch the - presumably - held connecting train.
At 10:28 I arrive, breathing heavily, so find that the train has not been held. An unfortunate oversight, apparently. Next train goes in 2.5 hours.
I would be more sympathetic if this had not happened before, but three times in a row cannot be an accident! I don't care if Belgium hasn't had a government for, like, decades, this sort of 'accident' happens too often to be coincidental. I smell a plot!
I suspect the Bruxellonians, trained as they are in pernicious plotting and devious delaying tactics by being the capital of the EU, are using their antediluvian rail road system to entrap travellers in an attempt to get them to spend all their funds to avoid boredom while being stranded in this consumer-fleecing den of iniquity. Like the robber bands of old, who diverted road signs to get travellers to spend the night in out of the way woodland inns, the better to rob them there, so their modern day equivalents neglect their train tracks to separate travellers from their planned route into the cold cavernous halls of Bruxelles Midi, with a view to separating them from their cash.
Well not with me! I spent my 2.5 hours of enforced Bruxelles-tude walking around in circles to keep warm, instead of spending money in the - heated! - restaurants, or heated! shops. I didn't even go to the loo which cost 60 cents, but held on until I boarded the train 2.5 hours later!
I did spend a considerable amount of time bitching at every information/help/customer service person I could ensnare, to no avail of course. The most helpful of the lot (a Eurostar official) advised me to 'fly next time, since only a fool took the train from London to Germany'. Thanks a lot!
So now I am boycotting all things Belgian. Well, there isn't all that much to boycott, aside from chocolate and Tintin, and I am not boycotting Tintin.
All of a sudden I understand the Brexitidiots who want to separate the continent from the UK mainland. If the likes of Double Dunce, Gollum, Microdot, and Blond Bimbo hadn't had to spent so much time in drafty Bruxelles waiting rooms this whole sorry saga might well have never happened ........
I shall write about the next part of the tragedy in my next post.
I also was delayed on the way back, surprise surprise....
