The Dublin Airport and Brussels the next day. . .
Goodbye. . .and Thank You
Dave, Cass and I went out to
dinner that night to try to kill some more time before our inevitable
boredom. We found a cheap restaurant and probably had one of the longest
dinners with the least amount of food in Dublin history.
The food wasn't bad at all. However, in Dublin and in the rest
of Europe, everyone eats mayonnaise with their French fries.
Fries are awful for you in the first place and to put a glob of
mayo on top of it makes it unbearably bad for you. It's always
nice to sample a local meal so the three of us got chicken.
We took a cab to the airport with a cabbie who gave us some
inside info on the situation in Northern Ireland between the
Catholics and the Loyalists. I had been reading some history on
friction between the two but of course I kept asking him question
after question. My impression was that the IRA were the trouble
makers involved in drugs and funding their campaign illegally. Apparently,
the whole thing stems from pre- Republic times when England gave Ireland it's
independence and how the Protestants remained loyal while the Catholics formed
the Republic of Ireland.
Anywho, the cab ride was short but sweet and very interesting. We got to the airport at about 11:00 at night and tried to get through to the gates to sleep but in Dublin, you can't get your boarding pass until two hours before takeoff. We, or rather I, tried to schmooze with the cop about getting through saying that we were on "American time" (not US time, "American time" gives it a little more of a kick) and that it was only 3:00 in the afternoon there. . .that "we weren't tired and our trip was in 6 hours." Well, to make a long story short, we were thrown downstairs near the arrivals and each grabbed a seat. I worked on the computer a little before I fell asleep, clinching my bags as I slept.
We woke up early and got the 6:55am plane to Brussels. We weren't exactly sure what we going to do that day or where we were going to stay. We didn't arrive at the main Brussels airport, but Brussels South which was a good hour from Brussels. Great. Onto a bus we hopped and made it to Brussels. We went to an ATM to get some cash and all the ATM would say every time we tried to money was, "Goodbye. . .and Thank You." So that's what we said to Brussels.
There just was not much
there. Scotland was playing Brussels in soccer so all over the place were
drunken Scots which may have been the best part. We grabbed a quick lunch,
(I had turkey and peaches, really good) and decided to get out of town.
The Scot may have been the best part of Brussels. . .
If it hadn't been for the Belgium Waffles. We were in the train station
when we said to ourselves, "If we aren't going to stay in Belgium, we have
to at least go get some waffles. . .so we did. We got on a train and
headed to Amsterdam.