Tales of spaceships, the Red Wall and an action-packed football match.
Sometimes you wake up and have to judge which you need most: more sleep or breakfast. We opted for sleep, eventually emerging into the sunlight at the crack of noon.
We moseyed our way up to the Hilton in the centre of town to collect our tickets and immediately started getting reacquainted with old friends. Having missed breakfast, food was high on the agenda so we dived into a cafe next to the Hilton. I’m not sure whether what I ordered was a savoury dish or a sweet dish. Cheese and Strawberries on toast is not something I have considered before, but it actually works. I washed it down with some sort of ginger lemonade thing which was rather splendid.
The book of faces was starting to fill up with videos of jolly revelry in the bars around the Grand Place. Yes, the main square is simply called ‘the Grand Place’. In fairness it is a place and it’s quite grand. It’s surrounded by halls representing some of the guilds that kept the wheels of commerce greased back in the day. Including the Grease Makers’ Guild.
Construction of the Place started in the 11th century and was completed in the 17th century. That’s six hundred years to build one market square. And I thought Caerphilly Borough Planning Department dragged their feet. It was a waste of time anyway, cos they had just finished it when the French came along and kicked it back down. I can imagine the French sat on a hill drinking wine and eating fromage baguettes waiting for them to finish so they could bash it up.
Anyway, it’s quite old, but not as old as you might think. It’s all been reconstructed.
I’m not sure when the Irish Pub was built, but I wasn’t in the mood for watching Wales fans demolishing the contents of its cellar. This might sound odd, it’s half the point of Wales Away, but we wanted to see parts of the city we hadn’t seen before.
The second biggest tourist attraction, after the Grand Place, is the Atomium. It’s a bugger to get to though and you wouldn’t really want to go that far out of town, unless you had another reason to go out there. Well, as it happens, it’s right next to the football stadium we are playing in tonight. That’s handy.
We hopped on the metro to head out of town. I say hopped, we wandered around the railway station staring at the signs like cavemen (and women) staring at fire for the first time. We narrowly missed accidentally getting on a train to Ghent and decided to go and ask someone.
The guy in the ticket office didn’t spreken ze English and I don’t parlez vous what ever lingo he did speak (there’s three different languages spoken in Belgium). But he took one look at my hat and handed me a strip of paper with an idiot’s guide of which lines to get on and where to change.
To travel on the metro you tap your contactless card as you get on, then again when you get off. All trips cost €2.80. However, if you make several journeys, the maximum you will be charged in one day is €8. I heard many tales of it being easy to bunk, but when we arrived at Heysel station, there were barriers that were not opening till you tapped and paid.
After a ten minute stroll we are walking past Minature Europe, or some such thing. A model village featuring many of the iconic sights of the capitals of the EU. Then just down a hill we approach the Atomium, basically a giant Christmas tree decoration you can go inside.
The Atomium (/əˈtoʊmiəm/ ə-TOH-mee-əm, French: [atɔmjɔm], Dutch: [aːˈtoːmijəm]) is a landmark modernist building in Brussels, Belgium, originally constructed as the centrepiece of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (Expo 58). Designed by the engineer André Waterkeyn and the architects André and Jean Polak as a tribute to scientific progress, as well as to symbolise Belgian engineering skills at the time, it is located on the Heysel/Heizel Plateau in Laeken (northern part of the City of Brussels), where the exhibition took place. It is the city’s most popular tourist attraction, and serves as a museum, an art centre and a cultural destination. Atomium – Wikipedia
We show our tickets and ride up an escalator to the first globe. It’s an exhibition area that tells the history of the structure. After a few minutes absorbing the history, we jumped on another escalator to the next sphere. At this point we were lulled into a false sense of security, thinking it would be escalators all the way to the top. It’s not.
We then visit a series of galleries with light displays that would be mildly interesting if you have never seen lights before, but for an old ‘cheesy quaver’ like me that has seen more than my fair share of light displays, it was leaning towards the under end of the whelming spectrum.
Then when you get to the top, it’s not the top. You have to climb down a shit load of stairs then go back up in a lift. When built in 1958 it was the fastest lift in the world. It’s not now.
At the top we finally have windows, so we can actually survey the surrounding area and take arial snaps of the stadium.
We head up another flight of stairs to the restaurant and take a seat. We look through the menu before the waiter advises us the kitchen is closed, which saved us fifty quid. Although our first beers of the day – two mojitos – and a bottle of water cost more than my first car.
We went back down to terra firma in the lift that is not the fastest in the world and had pasta in a cafe which was significantly cheaper than the posh restaurant we had just left. Now, we didn’t eat in the posh restaurant, but I’m reasonably confident the food up above would have been better than what I had for tea.
We chill for a while then walk to the stadium. It’s 6:30 of the PMs and kick off is always 7:45. Only an hour and a bit to wait.
We are literally among the first dozen people in the stadium, so grab a pint of the weakest beer in Belgium, without queuing, and park ourselves ready for the game. Patiently waiting for the hordes to arrive off the Metro. But they don’t. 7:30pm comes and the stadium is still empty. I mention this to Moppy who has arrived. He reminds me there’s an hour time difference, so kick off is 8:45 in Belgium time. Oh how we laughed. And the beer was still shit.
Eventually the Red Wall pour into the stadium, looking like people who had been overserved strong Belgian beer for nine hours. There’s the usual chaos of the ‘sit where you want’ variety. A female safety steward spends an hour trying to get people to stop standing in the aisles, before eventually giving up.
The national anthem is, as usual, epic. Then a game of football breaks out. With a little bit of help from a blind VAR dude, we are soon three goals down. All seems lost but the Red Wall just sings even louder. Just before half time we have a penalty. As it hits the back of the net, the Red Wall goes wild and the home fans go mild.
At half time an excited gentleman in front of us decides he has had too much to eat and drink so regurgitates some of it and deposits it on the floor for safe keeping.
The next forty-five minutes are a rollercoaster both on and off the pitch. Wales go for it. First a second goal goes in. Then an equaliser. The Wales end is a seething mass of screams, tears and people hugging strangers.
It’s so chaotic, one Wales fan falls from the upper tier down into the crowd on the lower tier. He lands with a bit of a thud. I’m not going to speculate on what caused his fall, but twenty-four hours later I can advise he is alive and in incredibly good health, considering. However, the excitement in the stadium is so intense, with the exception of the people immediately around this incident, nobody notices.
Belgium have a goal disallowed after Craig Bellamy kindly suggests to the VAR that Specsavers do a nice line in spectacles. The ref thanks him for his assistance with a yellow card. But with only a few minutes to spare Belgium finally hit the back of the net for the fourth time.
The final whistle brings disappointment but incredible pride that Wales had given one of the top ranked teams in the world a scare. Even when we were 3-3 Wales didn’t sit back, they were going for a win. I’ve never seen Wales fans so happy about a loss.
We are knackered and decide to give the metro a miss, and get an Uber back to the hotel for a night cap. Plans for Kazakhstan are shared, beers are drunk and piss is taken. We might not be fans of Brussels but hey, it’s Wales Away, ah ha, ah ha, I like it.