Oh my stars

I may have blipped the Berlaymont building before, but I cannot find it in my blip journal, so perhaps not.

As far as a combination of my diary and my blipfoto journal can tell me, the last time I was in Brussels, the city as opposed to the stations and the airport, was in March 2016. I've been to Bruges several times since then.

I'm in Brussels overnight for an event for alumni and friends of the Law School at Scotland House. It involved a fun discussion with a colleague, followed by Q&A, although the numbers were a lot lower than the number of people who had registered, which was disappointing. The event reinforced to me what an important resource our LLM graduates are, many of whom found their single year at UoE as transformatory as those who undertook the four year LLB in Scots Law. Anyway, it was an important networking event.

It turned into a lovely sunny evening, and I snapped this as we were walking over to a restaurant on the Rue Stevin for a quick supper. The beginnings were less auspicious. The direct Brussels flight from Edinburgh would not have delivered me and my colleague to the event on time, so we had to take the early flight to Charleroi ("Brussels South"), which was perfectly ok and quite on time, but then necessitated us taking the shuttle bus (very uncomfortable), to Brussels Midi, from where we used a combination of metro and feet to get to a cafe just across the road from our hotel, where we had lunch and chatted about our contribution to the event, before checking in. As we arrived in Brussels, the rain was pouring down (i.e. it's not just in Edinburgh...), but luckily it was dry by the time we were walking the streets.

We're staying in a very comfortable hotel, although while it has a decent desk to work on, there is no sign of a single plug socket anywhere in the vicinity of the desk, which is a bit odd. And annoying.

The very long days continue, although there is an end in sight.