Dueling Backpacks

It’s difficult to distill our time in Europe down to a few comments, but we certainly saw our fair share of town squares and old churches and we sat outside at countless cafes. Most of our time in Europe was spent within the Schengen Area, where there are no passport checks between countries and the currency is most often the Euro, but not always. Overall, it was fairly easy traveling. Especially after having come from China not too long before, traveling through Europe was a breeze. There are always delays, complicated logistics, and moments of intense confusion to figure out, but in general we had fewer of those moments traveling through Europe than other places we had been to on this trip.

Day 438 (September 9, 2019) – Brussels, Belgium We flew to Brussels on Ryanair, which meant that we were flying not to the main Brussels Airport but to the Brussels South Charleroi Airport, which is used by most of the low-cost carriers. It’s kind of a stretch to include Brussels in the airport name as it’s about as close to Brussels as it is to France, but there was a bus service from the airport to downtown. An hour or so after boarding the bus we arrived in the center of Brussels where we found the subway and took the short ride out to the home of Lauren and Kyle (and their dog, Ellie). Lauren, Travis, and I all went to graduate school together, and Lauren and Kyle used to have a house in Philly not too far away from ours before moving across the pond to Brussels for work.