In the spring, we wake up with the sun, and let the kittens in for some breakfast in bed treats.

We check our email, and then Adrian makes us cereal with fresh fruit (currently pineapple and strawberry), which we eat while watching something like The Daily Show. We finish getting ready, and then if we’re leaving at the same time, I will walk Adrian to the train station while counting puppies.

Adrian then boards the train to Leuven, and I hop on the metro to my work. Luckily both of us commute outwards from the centre of Brussels, so it’s easy to get a seat. I then have half an hour to read a book, listen to a podcast, or chat with a colleague if they happen to be in the same carriage.

From the metro stop I have a five minute walk to my work, situated in a business park on the outskirts of Brussels. I get some water for myself and my pot plant, sit down in my cubicle, switch on my laptop and look at my calendar for the day. As an epidemiologist, I use large patient databases to look at patterns of chronic diseases. I am responsible for the study design and implementation, as well as interpreting the results and communicating the conclusions at congresses and via manuscripts if the data look interesting. Generally my mornings are spent replying to emails while writing and reviewing documents. We have a great subsidised cafeteria on site, so I spend my lunch hour sitting outside with my colleagues discussing food, travel, and world news. My afternoons are typically filled with meetings, often teleconferences with the UK or the USA. Nine hours later, it is time to hop back on the metro and head home again.

If I stay in Brussels, I might meet up for coffee with a friend, go to my monthly book group or release unwanted books at the book swappers meet. Perhaps Adrian and I might go to a public lecture or to the movies, or I’ll pop into the supermarket next-door to our apartment to pick up a few ingredients for dinner. About once a fortnight I’ll hop on the train and meet Adrian and our Leuven friends for dinner and drinks.

After working through a PhD in Canberra, and then a full-time post-doc and part-time Masters program in Seattle, working only 40 hours a week here in Belgium leaves me with a lot of spare time on my hands and I often feel a bit lost. We are both hoping for a big change in our lives in August that gets us busier and gives us some unique challenges and adventures.

On Monday, as we had to catch the bus from Jen’s house to the train station, I made poor Adrian leave about five hours early to ensure that we wouldn’t be stuck in some sort of horrendous Roman traffic jam. Roma Termini was full of people – queueing, waiting, sleeping, and complaining. All tickets had been sold out for the rest of the week:

No seats were available in the train station, so we wedged ourselves and our luggage against a wall and waited for the minutes to tick past. We caught the train from Rome to Milan slowly north without incidence, and we were able to check into our hotel around 11:30pm. Our next train was set to depart at 7:10am. Adrian begged me not to make him get to the station five hours early again, and I agreed. I set both phones on to wake us up at 6:00am, and we even had time to grab a panini at the station before boarding our train to Zurich.

This was my favourite part of the route – what a difference between Italy and Switzerland, suddenly we were surrounded by snowy peaks, brightly washed houses, and crystal lakes. At lunch time we were in Zurich, grabbed some pizza and giant pretzels, then found our next train. I was so happy to finally see some sign of our progress:

As all the high-speed trains had been booked out, we had the rare chance of catching the INT90 from beginning to end, stopping at:

Zurich (Switzerland)
Baden (Switzerland)
Brugg (Switzerland)
Frick (Switzerland)
Stein-S (Switzerland)
Rheinfelden (Switzerland)
Basel (Switzerland)
St Louis Haut Rhin (France)
Mulhouse (France)
Colmar (France)
Selestat (France)
Strasbourg (France)
Metz (France)
Thionville (France)
Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Arlon (Belgium)
Libramont (Belgium)
Jemelle (Belgium)
Marloie (Belgium)
Namur (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Luxembourg (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Schuman (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Nord (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Central (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Midi (Belgium)

At one stage, I thought that the train announcer said “Nous n’arrivons jamais.” (We are never arriving), but quickly realised he was saying “Nous arrivons Jemelle (We are arriving in Jemelle), which was much better news. Later, when we first heard “Dames en heren” (Ladies and Gentlemen), all the Belgians cheered, because Flemish announcements meant that we were getting very close to home.

At 8pm that evening, we got off the train at the very last stop, pointed the way to the Eurostar for some stranded Brits, and then a short walk later were finally home with our kittens.

We go to the website, and it tells us that we cannot rebook online because we have already completed the online check-in procedure. We phone the call centre, but it is overloaded and we cannot connect. The call centre closes at 7pm GMT. We don’t know what to do. Do we book another ticket for Tuesday? Should we go with Ryanair or Brussels Airlines? Should we hire a car and drive, or catch a train all the way back to Brussels? We decide to see what the news is in the morning, and then go into town to assess the situation first-hand.

On Saturday morning, Adrian reads that the last time a volcano like Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 1821, it lasted for more than two years. We decide that we will not try to fly back to Brussels. We catch bus 38 to the train station, and try to find the end of the line for the international train tickets. This is the line:

While Adrian lines up, Lina helps me find the car hire booths. Every single company is completely out of cars. The people at the desks are just shaking their heads at anyone who approaches. One guy looks smug as he waves a reservation form. I bet he’s glad he booked ahead.

We wait in the line for 2.5 hours. The line is peppered with air passengers who flew into Rome and then had their connecting flights cancelled. The line for baggage storage is also daunting. Periodically, a staff member with a megaphone announces discouraging news like “No tickets to Paris until Wednesday”, and “There is an extra train to Madrid at 2pm. We can not issue reservations for this train. You will have to buy your tickets on the train”. We imagine the stampede that will happen that afternoon for those seats. Half of the ticket counters are closed, and there are only five staff members working. Each reservation takes at least 15 minutes to process. Often the ticket agents have to pull out rail maps of Europe to find an available route.

Finally, we reach the head of the line. I ask the ticket guy for tickets for the first train to Brussels. He shakes his head, “No trains left for today or tomorrow”, and seems to wave us away, like that’s that. “How about for the day after that?”, I ask. He looks very surprised, and I wonder if he has even looked up to see the line in front of him. A colleague comes and asks him what kind of sandwich he wants for lunch, and they discuss that for a while. However, he manages to find us train tickets from Rome-Milan, then Milan-Zurich-Basel-Strasbourg-Luxembourg-Brussels. We leave on Monday 19th April at 4:36pm and arrive on Tuesday 20th April at 19:51. We tell him that we’ll take it. For the two of us, the tickets are a total of 418.40 euro, plus 81 euro for a hotel for our 8 hour stopover in Milan.

We feel so lucky that we have tickets. As we returned home in a mass of people, I clutched my handbag fiercely, terrified that it would be stolen and remove our one chance at getting home. I still stroke the tickets occasionally, reassuring myself that we do have an escape from this mess. Our friend Lina is currently waiting at Rome airport, waiting to see if her flight to Australia via Malaysia will go ahead. In the meantime, we are holed up at Jenny’s apartment, doing our washing and hoping that we can return to our lives on Wednesday.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.

The ship let us off early so that we were able to catch the 8:57 train, getting us to the World Heritage listed Colosseum by 11:00 am. I had pre-purchased tickets on the web, so we were able to smugly walk past the long line of people waiting to buy tickets and get inside reasonably quickly. We had both pre-loaded Rick Steves’ audio guide onto our iPhones, and we listened to it as we walked through this immense structure. I enjoyed this particular commentary of Rick Steves’. Hearing the trumpets blare and his vivid descriptions, I could very easily look down into the centre ring and imagine the horrific theatrics that were played out in the second century CE. The underground passages that served as the backstage were also visible, giving an insight into the mechanics that were required for such a spectacle. To think that right on this spot, wild animals were brutally tortured, or that condemned men were placed in costumes and forced to act in a elaborate plays that would end in their death. This is the place where an estimated million animals and half a million people were put to death for entertainment. Although, having just seen the enormous bull ring in Malaga, I wondered how much has really changed in 1900 years.

I told Adrian that we had no time to stop and eat, so we grabbed a pizza and toasted sandwich to eat while on the metro. Our next stop was a visit to the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta. The order ruled over Jerusalem, then Rhodes, then Malta until it was ejected when Napoleon I captured the country in 1798. After the loss of Malta the Order settled permanently in Rome in 1834. The Magistral Villa is located on the Aventine hill, and hosts the Grand Priory of Rome, the Embassy of the Order to the Holy See and the Embassy of the Order to the Italian Republic. The Order still claims sovereignty, and thus the villa has extraterritorial status. I was able to peek through the keyhole and see St Peter’s basilica through the avenue of trees. That was our next destination.

After returning to Italy, it was time to cross another border into the Vatican City, and experience Adrian’s 100th World Heritage site (my count is around 50). The immense granite obelisk towers over the square. Originally carved by the Egyptians to honour the sky god Ra, then stolen by the Romans to venerate Jupiter, it now stands with a tiny cross at its peak to mark the transition from one superstition to another. There was a 100-foot tree nearby that was a gift from Belgium, and when the Pope received it he declared “May the Church in Belgium, and especially the Diocese of Liège, continue to be a land where the seed of the Kingdom, that Christ came to scatter on earth, generously germinates”.

Thanks to the terrible weather, the line into St Peter’s basilica was relatively short, and we were soon inside the church. Once inside, I was very impressed by the vast and ornate interior. The floor looked like a rich carpet, though it was really a pattern constructed in marble. Every surface was gilded or embellished in some way. We listened to Rick Steves’ audio guide, which irked me a little. I didn’t like hearing about his very statements about “Jesus’ message of love”, that “things are much more enjoyable here if you become a temporary Catholic”, and “your time here can be awe inspiring and beautiful if you accept and respect things on Catholic terms”.

However, he did touch upon the financing with indulgences, pillaging of the Pantheon, and torture during the Inquisition. He spoke of how the church betrayed Michelangelo, by promising they would be faithful to his plans and then altering them soon after his death. I learnt that the reason that the bronze statue of St Peter near the alter is wearing a toga is because it was probably originally of a Roman official, and later on the Catholics just replaced the head and placed some keys in his hand.

Suddenly it was 4pm, time to head back to the ship. We discovered that the metro station that google maps claimed was near the San Pietro train station did not actually exist, and thus decided it was best to catch the metro all the way back to the Roma Termini station and catch the train from there. By the time we finally got onto a train it was not going to arrive at Civitavecchia until 5:57pm, giving us only a half hour window for delays and getting back to the ship. Happily, the train moved towards the coast without delay, and we made it back onto the ship with ten minutes to spare.

These are the ruins of a great Roman settlement called Sala Colonia that was built on both sides of the bridge across the Bou Regreg river. On the side that we visited, our guide walked us through the ruins, pointing out the function of each place. It was so easy for me to step back in time and imagine the pedestrians crossing the bridge, paying the tax at the gate, with the shops nearby filled with items to tempt sailors and other travellers. We wandered through the sites of the houses of the merchants, and stepped over a series of aqueducts that once led to a vast reservoir of water for drinking and to fill the saunas. Even the pattered mosaic floor of one home, built over 1800 years ago, was still intact below a layer of red dust.

In the fourteenth century, one part of this area was converted into a school, a mosque, and a mausoleum. The stones once used in Roman arches were re-used to build a minaret, and the classic Latin inscriptions were replaced by intricate Arabic scripts. Three generations of sultans, including that of Abu l-Hasan, were buried on the site, their graves still marked by brightly patterned tombs. We walked though the ruins of the small mosque, and we saw the niche in which the Imam stood at the front, his back to the others so that he was also facing East, his words amplified and forced backwards by the curve of the stone.

Today, the most conspicuous residents of Chellah are the storks, building their nests at the top of the columns, and gathering sticks from the nearby trees. We saw them courting each other with bends of the neck and rapid snaps of the beak. They seem quite content with this sanctuary that gives them peace and protection, close to the river yet safe from predators.

We next visited Tower Hassan, the minaret built by sultan Yaqub al-Mansur. Intended to be the largest mosque in the world, construction began in the 12th century, but stopped only four years later once the sultan died. The tower is only half the height that it was intended, and the only sign of the rest of the mosque are the crumbling walls and 200 columns that were taken from Roman ruins and assembled in rows.

After seeing the highlights of Rabat, we hopped back onto the train, as we wanted to ensure that we gave ourselves plenty of time to see Casablanca and then return to the ship. On the outskirts of both Rabat and Casablanca there were vast slums built next to garbage dumps, reminding me how lucky I was to be born into such fortunate circumstances.
We had lunch at a lovely restaurant called Sqala, set inside the ancient medina of Casablanca. We both had meals slow-cooked in a tajine (vented cooking pot), and I followed this up with a chocolate fondue with kiwifruit, pineapple, apple, and banana. It was delicious and I even managed to eat it without ending up covered in chocolate myself.

Then we spied the world’s tallest minaret on the horizon, and we headed for Hassan II mosque. The mosque, designed by French architect Michel Pinseau, is really beautiful, far more pleasing than the Sagrada Família, the colours blending perfectly with the surroundings. The building sits on the peninsula, as the fierce winds blow out from the Atlantic the warm sandstone reflects the light from the sky and offers protection from the elements. The blues and greens in the mosaics were delicate and precisely complemented the churning sky and tumultuous sea.
The area was full of tourists and locals, taking photos and posing for each other. Young women strolled about in jeans and designer handbags, some with headscarves, some without. We saw a young boy running in circles through puddles, his baby sister trying her best to keep up without getting too wet. A group of mixed sex teens hung out together, sitting on the absolution fountains, flirting and laughing. Even right next to the mosque, Casablanca was not a place of strict religious oppression. While a lot of the city was run down, the people had an upbeat and cosmopolitan attitude. The taxi drivers, shop keepers, and waiters were all multilingual, and the whole place felt very European.

We left Morocco with a firm desire to explore it more thoroughly next time we return. It was a very long walk all the way back to the ship, through the streets and navigating the complex dock, but we finally made it back to our cabin where I was so exhausted I refused to go out for dinner, and made poor Adrian miss out on his promised reward of pizza after a very long day.

A lot of people don’t like the austere and brutal lines of Central Station. It doesn’t have the splendor of Antwerp Station or the charm of Schaarbeek. There are few flowing curvilinear forms here. It is a very blocky, functional building, but I think that it has some hidden charms. In the great hall, glass slabs of light fall down upon the passengers. Its facade is adorned with nine large vertical windows, representing the nine provinces of Belgium of the time.

When I am one of the 140,000 passengers who visit the station each day, I stop to marvel at the fascinating stone from which much of the building is constructed. I think it might be Gobertange, a type of white calcareous sandstone. It is cut against the grain to reveal its layers, and there are occasional fossilised shells buried deep inside its crevices. Like a lot of Brussels, you just need to dig a little bit deeper to find its jewels.