When in Brussels ...

It's been a great weekend here en Belge. All the way from Birmingham in four hours, to this entirely different place. Well ... I say entirely different - there's a lot of concrete and brutal architecture in both places, but you can't get moules in Brum, that's for sure. It's a very painless journey though, and takes in the new St Pancras Eurostar terminal, which allows us to pick up some crucial Monmouth coffee supplies.

This morning we dumped our luggage in the Gare du Midi (nice, easy to use self serve luggage lockers) and wandered round the market next door - luscious fruit and vegetables; plump dark figs, massive bunches of lime green pungent mint, beautifully irregular carrots (ironic in the capital of the EU), perfectly round plum coloured aubergines, together with cheap goods from China, halal meat stalls, lorries which open out into fromageries and all around, the Arab stallholders shouting 'mashallah mashallah', 'les cadeux, les cadeux', 'hollah hollah hollah'. It was pouring with rain so after this we took a tram to the Ixelles district, supposedly full of art nouveau buildings, but these mostly eluded us. Instead we had a couple of Belgian beers in a slightly trendy restaurant, while watching a man outside making his way through a litre bottle of Smirnoff.

A perfect weekend in my ancestral home of Belgium!