Unwanted Attention.

This travel day of Halloween deserves its own post since it was so…. Epic. We were flying with Aerlingus this time, A REAL AIRLINE, so there was not so much layering involved in this particular travel. It would have been hilarious though, because Lizz had forgotten her BIG, fluffy blue coat, so I would have had to wear that AND a pea coat. Overkill if you ask me. When we arrived to Brussels we parted ways with Karina and reunited with Lizz and Isabelle to start the journey to Maastricht. THIS was quite the experience.

Mallie had sent me this information about train travel about 1 week before fall break:

“The Brussels National Airport train station is underneath the airport, so you just take a train there to Brussels Nord, then one to Leige, then to Maastricht... they are all under an hour so its not as long at is sounds... ”

Had I known it involved three different trains, I probably would have gone with an earlier flight, but what is done is done, so we had accepted the fact that for Halloween, we would be on a train. We figured we might be able to join in on the festivities a little bit late. Since we were going to spend Halloween on a train. Laura and I bought 2-euro fluffy, pink bunny ears and wore them all day in Dublin and through our travels. In Dublin, there were people dressed up and everyone completely understood why we had bunny ears on. Upon arrival to Brussels, we got stared at. A LOT. The immigration people asked WHY on earth we were wearing the ears? They kept pointing and saying,  “Look, there are two of them!” We answered with "Its Halloween!" which apparently was not a good enough reason. Oh well. WE LIKED OUR EARS. 

We got our train tickets and realized that  the train stations written on the detailed itinerary I asked the lovely woman that helped us to print out, did not match at ALL with what Mallie had said. BUT the final destination was Maastricht so I figured it was right. We got on train #1 and I realized I had no idea where we were supposed to get off. Since I was being very loud and vocal about this, a very nice girl informed me that the two train stations I was talking about were the same one. Only I was saying it in French and my train ticket was written in Dutch. I guess since we were going to Maastricht, it was written in Dutch but we were still in Brussels, so everything was in French… SO CONFUSING.

Casual

When we finally arrived to Leige (or Luik, like it said in my ticket) I was reading the departure time board to double check if there was not a train earlier. A very nice man saw me staring blankly at it and asked where I was going. When I told him Maastricht, he said, “Yeah, you just (5 minutes ago!) missed the train”. Damn it. Like I have not spent enough time waiting around in train station at this point (oh, if only I knew what was in store for me three days later....). We headed on over to platform 3 anyway and decided we were setting up a "waiting fort". We got to platform #3 and the lovley man from before found us again and said, “LOOK! The train was waiting for you”. Turns out it was NINE minutes late, AKA arriving right then. FINALLY, SOME GOOD TRAIN KARMA. We happily hopped on and got to train station #3. There, I again stared at the schedule to figure out what platform our train was on. A really nice guy saw me and asked (again) where we were going, Turns out, he was going to Maastricht too so he said we could just get on the train with him! So nice.

The train ride itself was quite the adventure because this group of very sleazy looking men got on. When they saw four ravishing girls (our friend was sitting behind us), two of whom were wearing bunny ears, they sat down with us. And by “us” I mean Laura and I (wearing the ears) because Lizz and Isabelle were sleeping since they had woken up at around 3 am. Turns out, these skeez balls were Italian. from Sicily, specifically (remember when I said Italy was following us on fall break? Case in point). I swear they were probably part of the Mafia considering they were from Sicily, had greasy hair AND one of them was missing a tooth. We had quite a funny conversation (when they realized we understood Italian). Funniest part of the conversation was when Lizz decided to surface from under her jacket when she thought she was being called a betch…. And then the men were shocked at how pretty she was, considering she had hiding under her hood. Too funny. Lizz did not think so though. Hehehehe. 

Sad bunnies.

We finally got to Maastricht and we ran to our friend (the last thing we needed was to be followed by sleazy Italian men) and he was SO NICE that he walked us all the way to our hostel, considering we were one hour earlier than what we had told Mallie and Hank, plus it was Halloween, so they were celebrating. After about 10 minutes into our walk Yelle (our friend) commented on Laura and my bunny ears. He then explained that in Brussels and Holland, Halloween was celebrated just on the Saturday of Halloweekend, so basically he informed us of how ridiculous we looked, because we were two days late. GREEEEAAAATTT.

Finally, Laura and I gave up and took our ears off.