London St Pancras to Brussels and Belgium's Kusttram, 15-17 April , 2023
More Notes from Small Railpass (Notes d'un petit Railpass/Aantekeningen van een kleine treinpas/Notizen aus einem kleinen Railpass/Küçük Bir Demiryolu Geçidinden/ملاحظات من ممر سكة حديد صغير):
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Here are four positive things about the enormous post-Brexit queues at St Pancras International Eurostar station:
1. They move at a fair clip (good for the neuralgia!)
2. Queues are organised train-by-train (so everyone in your train is plodding along towards the ticket scanners at a fair rate).
3. The ticket scanner spits out a reservation for a better seat!
4. You can bring your own coffee.
Once inside the opaque glass partition, the world changes dramatically. A third of what used to be a fairly small holding/waiting area for international trains has now been consumed by the massed technology of travel security including wheeleries of heavy luggage - there is no bag checkin - and politeish chaos as everything is loaded into big, waist-high plastic tubs (one per bag, then one other for the bits-n-pieces…) while the relentless and optimistic sorcerer’s-apprentice’s-brooms-march of the ticket queues pressure from behind. Uniformed staff manage with a kind of professional level of fraught, in two (publishable) languages.
After uncrating your life, another extended queue awaits… however the overseer this time is very French: “Passeporte? You are Australian? This way, please”. I’m sidelined, identified, stamped and now “in” “Europe” while the extended line of (mostly Brits) straggles off on into the far distance, wheelie bags in tow.
London: St Pancras
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Brussels Midi/Zuid
At Brussels Midi/Zuid (take your pick, it’s the same functional terminal whichever language you apply) there are no security checks, just take the giant elevator down and find your self in ragged, multicultural St Gilles. My pub was across from an extended metro digging: “Construction of Toots Thielman Station” that has been happening here at least since the 1980s. As Midi/Zuid is the centre of Belgium’s language divide, signs are all in French/English/Flemish, and the greeting is usually: “Bonjour!”. Travel 15 minutes north into Flanders and this changes dramatically (including on train announcements being only in the preferred language of your train conductor de jour/van de dag).
Belgium’s official languages are Dutch, French and a minority of German in search of (or avoidance of) some kind of shared identity. These days you can add some diverse bits of Turkish and Arabic from a smattering of countries, and St Gilles is like a Brussels’ Cabramatta or Footscray. It is scrappy, confusing, loud, overly-graffitied, fading-exuberant Art Nouveau apartments full of ”Night Shops” with conspiratorial Muslim boys whispering behind the fridges at the back while their male elders run a business that is yet to see a SevenEleven.
When you enter Russia, you are greeted by massive posters of national heroes or of Putin, Xi in China, but in the square at Brussels Midi the massive two-storeyed revolving portrait is Herge’s Tin Tin and Snowy the bone-in-mouth doggy, doing rotating eagerness at the top of The Metropole. Tin Tin pursuing steam trains is also the wall mural in the few parts of Midi/Zuid station where they’ve not managed to rent out every inch into retail concessions.
My pub had a faded/jaded North African vibe, reinforced by the “teamwork” behind the desk: young guy knowing what to do and striving to be efficient; older male next to him running interference and complicating the simplest procedure (getting room key from desk-to-paw took all of 5 minutes as the process involved intense, plodding, mansplaining direction-giving (from the elder) and tolerant waiting-til-its-over-to-get-on-with-it (from the younger) til the key hit my hand. This final manoeuvre was only achieved by deferring to the elder and sending him to do three Very Important and utterly unnecessary photocopies to remove the obstruction.
On the corner north of the pub, somewhat out of place, is a fancy art-nouveau glass-awning-fronted North African steak restaurant with uniformed flunkeys strutting the gravel, opening car doors to very elegantly clad women and white-shoed consorts breaking their Ramadan fast. Surrounding this place are a couple of bloodhouse snooker bars, offers of interesting personal services, and a not-very-super market. A ten minute walk south along Rue du Midi takes you straight to the ornate Renaissance and Baroque buildings of the tourist area with an increasing array of fancy food options (and increasingly fancy prices) along the way. When the waffle joints’ counter displays feature more vibrant colours than a Women’s Weekly Birthday Cakes Cookbook you have “arrived” at Le Manniken Pis.
Along the northern side of Midi/Zuid station, the old line of fading Parisian-style brasseries was bulldozed to create a charmless Eurostar terminal. The businesses were shifted into the ground floor of an anonymous high-rise, but at least the food, house plonk and condescending service survive. With Covid, tips are no longer a thing here as it’s “service compris” by plastic card.
The Clemenceau laundromat, surrounded by drab and shuttered “night shops” and a rather good Turkish grill, seems to be where grannies come to keep warm and watch fitful TV during the day. The printed and well-worn instructions remained a mystery to me but one old lady giggled at me so much that hijab to knees were shaking. She shared her washing powder and was happy for me to buy more jetons than I needed for her later use.
St Gilles was really just a place to sleep while commuting to revisit some favourite Belgian haunts…. I’ll save you from a description of the favourite down-at-heel industrial rust-belt of Charleroi where the steel industry and economy are in free-fall (and the photography can be suitably atmospheric) made worse by the global financial crisis and the politics of a country where it can take 2 years to form government after an election and the bureaucrats seem quite happy to keep governing until it happens.
Excellent base for the EU, n’est pas/is het niet????
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A Belgian Joke:
A major newspaper in Brussels is published daily in two languages.
A corridor divides the language groups who produce the paper. On the left hand side, the sign on the door says:
“IN THIS OFFICE WE SPEAK FRENCH”
Across the corridor’ the sign on the Flemish office says:
“IN THIS OFFICE, WE DO NOT SPEAK. WE WORK”
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Flanders seems assertively more successful and better organised than French Wallonie. Dutch seems more aggressively spoken. (English preferred for/to tourists: no cheery “Bonjours” here). The traditional political framework of being a bilingual country is falling out of daily use since Belgium adopted a more Federal model of increased self government for Wallonie and Flanders.
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Monday:
From (almost) France to (adjacent to) Holland by Kusttram: South to North.
Catch Intercity train to De Panne (nearly 2 hours: SUCH a long journey in Belgium):
De Panne was once a quiet village.
De Panne is “PLOPSALAND” now, welcoming happy kiddies and credit card wielding parents into a (p)lopsided, out-of-kilter, mock-fake-Tudor-art-nouveaish kind of Ettamogah-Pub-like theme park. The cartoon characters are a Very Big Deal here if you speak Dutch. I’m told.
The frequent tram, escaping north to Knokke along the coast through Ostend: looking goooooood.
It’s pleasant, and less than 10 Euros for a day ticket, to amble along by tram, stopping for moules and frites at lines of small town bars and cafes, downing 12% proof local beers, wandering monuments commemorating both wars, gazing at farming and coastal forest scenery, staring aghast a hotel that is a concrete replica of the “Normandie” ocean liner with three red funnels…
This southern part of the Flanders stayed in Belgian hands throughout WWI, with the king and queen living among their people; Niewpoort remained the only North Sea port to controlled by the Belgian government. Strategic flooding of canals kept the Germans at bay. The monuments in Niewpoort impressively attest to this.
Catch next tram.
Belgian dogs are well adapted/adjusted to public transport (just watch for stray paws where you tread). With one large exception, the several doggies on every tram were content to lie at their owners’ feet and silently enjoy the ride. The one large and yelping brown mongrel kept disgracing itself by howling with the “doors closing” chimes. Dark stares from surrounding passengers convinced the owner it was time for a walk. The dog too.
Given the massive beer culture of bars and restaurants and specialised breweries, public drunkenness seems relatively rare here. North of Niewpoort a mid-40’s skinny guy, the sun not yet over the yardarm (though he certainly was….) lumbered onto the back section of the tram and staggered his way ingratiatingly to sit next to the prettiest possibly 17-yearold girl to schmooze. She developed a sudden fascination with her mobile phone, twisting towards the doorway to avoid the attentions. A somewhat older couple, across the aisle, gently and smilingly engaged him in conversation, and kept engaging him continuously until, their persuasive smiles and light tone intact, he decided bailing out of this tram of was his best option: good result all round.
A lot of this coastal journey used to be along the flat and featureless North Sea beaches: quite beautiful at sunset. Some of the landscape south of Ostend still is: several kilometres of sand to shimmered to the west with some lone fishers far away on breakwaters beyond massive concrete retaining walls. Trees are rare. A Belgian army base is to the east of the roadway, behind low sandhills and concrete pillboxes. Their guns are firmly aimed towards England.
But… about 5 kilometres south of Ostend, the tramlines have been shifted a block inland so the passenger view becomes the arse-end of monstrous high-rise tourist apartment towers… not so much the towers as their ugly garages, massed wretched industrial plastic bins and all of the detritus of the-view-that-no-one-has-paid-to see. They are a monster dreariness of blocks-of-flats-built-to-a-price with balconies bolted-on to forgettable lumpen real estate. Trees are rarer.
Entering Ostend, after a brief glimpse of alluring beach, the architecture to the left improves to a long, lower-rise-Greco-Roman-Victorian-grandish seaside hotel. The trams venture into the more picturesque streets and green squares of a businesslike Belgian town and the vast and once internationally important railway station.
This was the haunt of the Continental boat trains and international sleeper services whose passengers arrived or departed Europe by ferry to the UK. In 1982 I was one such passenger, having weathered the cramped East German 2nd class compartment car (DDR transit visa issued by a stern frontier officer trying to maintain his Socialist composure while standing, wearing a small cantilevered desk around his neck, on which to stamp, correctly, the passports on a jolting train) from West Berlin for a full day. It was so exciting, then, to hear seagulls and to wolf down coffee and waffles after 7 lean hours of an icy day of meagre East German heating and an even more meagre catering-trolley cheese roll in Nuremberg for sustenance.
The station now has cargo ships tied up where the ferries used to be; its an interchange for regional Belgian transit with a picturesque canal outlook. A zip over some picturesque lifting bridges and you enter the massive port, stevedoring and heavy industry around Ostend Harbour. After a few more kilometres of soft coastal forest, you will arrive into classy De Han Sur Mer.
Imagine, if you will, an Edwardian English bourgeois fantasyland of a pristine seaside resort away from the day-tripping working classes (servants allowed, apparently) where one could practice one’s Public School French on the compliant local “help”. It’s everything that Bognor Regis is not: well-preserved and maintained salt-water-middle-class-suburban-bay-windowed accommodation houses, clustering around the chocolate-box-Swiss inspired station, beautifully preserved, for the local tram. Cute.
Catch the next tram.
Half an hour north is Zeebrugge with more high-rise apartments between tram and beach. Much of it is commuter belt for port workers with its blandness relieved by a dainty Geneva-style covered bridge to the shops.
Don’t even get off the tram.
The mountains of shipping containers and seemingly endless trainloads of export SUVs stretched for kilometres into the distance, relieved by a couple of moored cruise ships and a road blockage at Zeebrugge Zeesluice. The huge opening bridge, vertically confronted the tram, its tramlines soaring skywards. The driver made a quick swerve to the right onto a couple of kilometres of spare rails to cross another -lowered - bridge to the east. A further swerve to the left following the opposite river bank brought the tram towards the hedge-lined back yards of settled suburbia near the end of the line church in Knokke, another small town now very much a commuter suburb. All of this is best viewed from the comfortable rear-seat window of a departing tram.
It is a short journey to the Dutch border, but chances are you won’t sense much of a difference after all day in Flanders.
Walk to station. Catch the Intercity back to the vibrant French and Middle-Eastern linguistic jumble that is St Gilles. Enjoy the rich tapestry of the Arabic/French/Turkish wall of street sounds.
Et bonsoir!
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