21- Belgium: Breaking news from Brussels

A couple of months of work was more than enough for us so a break was required for a couple of days. We’d forgotten how tiring this “real world” stuff could be! A quick look at flight websites showed you could get pretty cheap flights in and out of Belgium for a weekend so off we went. A weekend of tourism was what we planned but it turned into something else altogether.

We arrived early Friday evening and had a lovely night strolling through the city- nice food and a few drinks. We had seen lots of soldiers with guns on the streets but hadn’t taken much notice as this was the EU capital and neither of us had been to Belgium before so didn’t know what was normal or not. We’ve been to a number of countries where having soldiers with guns on the street is just a regular day!

The next morning we headed out for breakfast and a walk. We arrived back to the hotel at lunch with a view to then moving onto do more touristy things further afield. When we got into a Wifi zone (the hotel) messages started coming through- “is all OK”, “what’s going on over there?” “what are you up to?”, “have you been able to leave your hotel?”. Oblivious as to what was going on, we checked the news sites and saw that Brussels was apparently on lockdown due to terrorist threats- this was coming a week after the Paris attacks so it wasn’t totally out of the blue but was definitely news to us. The more we read, the clearer it became that we’d be best to just stay in the hotel. The safest place to be. better safe than sorry and all that. As the day progressed and we continued to get news updates, the city continued to close down more and more things as the search for people involved in the Paris attacks intensified. - no trains running, the mayor had told all bars and restaurants to close. Not much we could do really. All very disconcerting but at least we were nice and safe in our hotel.

That plan went well for us until about 2am when my wife woke me. “There’s lots of noise outside our door, will you get up and check what it is?”. As a good husband I got up and did what I was told so we could both go back to sleep. I looked through the peephole in the door first to check if I could see what the noise was. Surprisingly I could see quite a lot through that little hole! What seemed like the entire Belgian army (or at least ten to fifteen of their SWAT team) along with their large rifles were outside our room and coming and going out of the room across the hall from ours. This was not what I was expecting! I continued to watch for a few minutes and they all seemed relatively calm so I took the step of opening our door……….. very slowly. Straight away one of the plain-clothes policemen was over to me saying “No issue sir, go back to bed, no issue, just routine”. It’s like that phrase- nobody has ever calmed down after been told to calm down! This may have been a lot of things but routine was not how I would describe it, not with that number of soldiers and at this time on the fifth floor of a hotel that they’d need keycard access to get up to.

So step two of calming our nerves was to ring reception and find out what was really going on. The answer we got there was equally unsuccessful in calming us down. “Just a routine ID check sir, no issue”. Really? At 2am? Really? That sounds like the most non-routine ID check we’ve ever come across. So what could we do? We couldn’t leave our room- we had a whole division of the Belgian army outside our room- sure, we’re as safe here as anywhere! Surely they’d evacuate us if there was a real issue. What else was there to do but sleep?! Well for me anyway, my wife spent the rest of the night reading news updates and trying to book flights back to Dublin on Sunday morning to no avail. I guess we’re stuck here until check out.

So the next morning, with one of us well rested, and no more walkie talkies in the corridor outside the room, we said we’d go for a stroll around just to see what was going on. Couldn’t stay in the hotel any longer- going stir crazy.  Walking through the streets, it was clear everyone else had the same idea. How long can you stay indoors when nothing is actually happening outside? There were naturally lots of army on the streets but lots of people too milling around too. As we walked, the happiest people we came across were a few British TV reports who we overheard congratulating each other on a good job finding a nice quiet street to report from! It’s all about how you frame the story after all. Hundreds of people were walking in the street parallel but they were filming on the street where nothing was open. It linked to well to a photo one of the news webstes had used overnight showing Brussels being deserted due to the terror alerts. Only issue my eagle eyed wife spotted with the photo was that there was no sign of the 50 foot Christmas tree that was sitting in the middle of the square. No idea when the photo was from but it certainly wasn’t from that weekend.

Brussels isn’t a big city to walk around so it wasn’t long before we were retreading our steps so we were wondering what we should do for the rest of the day- original plan of a trip to Bruges was obviously not going to happen. As we walked, a large amount of police and army vehicles began mobilizing down the street and a few of them began clearing taxis from a rank. They clearly had some sort of information and we didn’t stay around to find out what that was. WE collected our bags and headed for the airport four hours early. Certainly wasn’t the place we wanted to be but we figured it was as safe a place as any in the city. That day it was safe but sadly after the attacks on the airport in March that thinking has now been proven false also.

Brussels, or what we saw of it was lovely, beautiful buildings, great beer, super chocolate. Obviously it was disappointing that we didn’t get further than a kilometre from our hotel but maybe next time.

So that was our weekend away- definitely could have been better but given what’s gone on before and since, it could have been a lot worse too.

Click here to see a selection of photos from our Belgian trip

Route

Fly Dublin to Brussels, fly back to Dublin