Today we have to head back to the UK, we started as we have every day with a trip to Mokafe for breakfast, our usual waiter didn’t seem to be working today but despite that the bread, yogurt and coffee all arrived without problem. We went back to the apartment and packed, which to be honest didn’t actually take very long as we hadn’t brought much with us, then we decided to go for a final walk round. We set off to the Grand Place, which seemed to be quite busy today with a lot of organised tours meeting in the square, it is very organised, the city provide a free (I think) walking tour of the main tourist area each of the guides holds an umbrella with a country flag on the top denoting which language the tour will be in, so a Spanish flag for those wanting the tour in Spanish, Union Jack for English etc. We didn’t both joining a tour as we have already done everything we wanted to do, but we did have a walk back to the meat market via the stock exchange, we then went down a road we hadn’t been down before which apparently was once the canal but it has been covered over, I am not sure if that means that it is still possible to navigate it, or if they drained it and changed the route, I suspect the latter as there is an underground station just off the square and I would have though having a canal running just above the metro would be a bit high risk. We continued our walk and got to the main shopping street, it would seem that as well as the museums being closed on Monday’s so are most of the shops, the only places that seem to be open are the ones serving food such as the waffle shops! It felt like it might start to rain so we decided to start heading back to the apartment for a bit of a relax before heading off to the train this afternoon. We had booked a late checkout so we didn’t need to leave the apartment until 1pm, so after a relax and in my case a munch of the cherries I had brought at the market the other day we set off for the station. We are now a lot wiser to the transport system and brought a duo ticket (two for the price of one) which meant that the transfer to midi only cost 2.50 rather than the 5 it had cost us on the way here. We arrived on the platform just as the train was arriving so we jumped on and once at midi we joined the queue for Eurostar then the queue for passport control and finally the queue for UK immigration, none of which were as bad as the way out unfortunately they don’t have a cafe in the waiting area so we went back to the duty free area and brought a couple of beers each then found and seat in the waiting room and had a drink. Before we knew it we were joining the queue to get on the train. Apparently the train was busier than usual but as always they held the train so we took our seats, got served a meal and by the time we had finished that we were off! It felt very hot on the train but that may have been the 2 cans of 8% Belgian beer we brought on the way though! However before we know it we had passed though Lille and we were in the tunnel heading to London. We arrived at St Pancras about 15 minutes late only to find out that there was a tube strike, all exits to the underground were closed so we had to go to the opposite end of the platform and get on Thames Link to join the newly opened Elizabeth Line, despite this we actually got home about the same time as we would have taking the tube.
