Planes, Tubes, Trains, and Awful Taxi Rides

Once we had our luggage, we found our way to the tube (where I mistaknely spent way more on a tube ticket than I should have, but as they say hindsight is 20/20).  We rode about an hour to St. Pancras Station where we had hours to wait for our train to Brussels.  (I had allowed us extra time in case of a delayed flight, but of course since I did that everything was on time.)  I tried to buy lunch, but I was told my pounds were outdated and no good.  WTH?  Apparently, the UK updated some of their money between when I was there two years ago and now.  Thankfully, I had some current money, which was acceptable.  Good thing because I was hungry (though I guess I could have had a Cliff bar, I'd packed a bunch of those).  Anyway, I think it was before noon when we got to the train station and our train wasn't until 3 so we had plent of time to wander around, eat, and of course read my book.  But eventually 1:45 arrived and they let us go through security, sit in another waiting area, and finally board the train to Brussels.  It was a nice enough train.  And two hours later we were in Brussels.  We found a taxi right out the doors of the train station.  We were not impressed when he said it would cost 20 Euros (more on that in a later post), but we were exhausted so we paid 20 Euros for us and our luggage to drive under 2 miles to a hotel.  The driver was screaming AND texting on his phone for much of the ride and thank goodness he had good brakes!  I am not super religious, but some praying may have occured in that taxi.  Does Belgium not have a hands free rule?  It was not a good introduction to Belgium, but I promise you we enjoyed the country much more after that ride so it's true first appearances can be deceiving (or whatever that saying is).  Got to the hotel, checked in (the hotel staff was lovely!) and were told that they were overbooked because of a wedding so they only had twin beds.  They offered to put them together if we wanted to go for a walk now, but after being up for over 24 hours I think any bed would have done at that point and the hubs was in no mood to go for a walk right then.  So we checked into our hotel, got settled, hubs napped, and an hour or so later we wandered around the neighborhood a bit and ironically on our first night in Belgium had dinner at an Irish pub.  Back to the hotel for a little NCIS because yes, you can watch NCIS in Belgium and then to sleep.  Correction:  attempted sleep.  There were bars/restaurants close to our hotel and it was 70 degrees on a Saturday night in April (not normal for Brussels in April or so I'm told), which meant people were out late having a great time.