There and Back Again, The Brussels Trip

I was so excited for the Brussels trip that Law and Digital Technologies masters offers since the very beginning of the year. The day came last week and I left from Leiden Centraal for a four-days trip due to a conference with my classmates to the Belgian capital.

Even though our train was delayed almost for 20 minutes at Rotterdam Centraal and made us all wait under the freezing conditions, train-trip itself was a very nice experience for all of us until the very last moment. At Brussels Noord, the stop where we should all disembarked, two of our classmates didn’t realise that they should have disembarked, therefore, we had a tiny crisis moment in our group. In the end, we all reached to our hotel safe and sound though.

Our first stop in Brussels was the European Parliament. After having passed the security check, we were waiting at the entrance hall. Here, many of us didn’t miss the opportunity to take a picture with Dutch flag or their country of origin’s flag. However, there was only one flag which everyone took a picture with: The Union Jack! Before the replacement of the flag because of the Brexit, everybody wanted to seize this historical opportunity.

After a very informative presentation by one of the employees of the Parliament about the European Union and the Parliament in particular, we have been to the hemicycle. Here we had another presentation about the daily life in the Parliament and parliamentary sessions before taking millions of pictures and selfies.

Later on, we left the Parliament and started to explore the city centre. For our first evening in Brussels, we decided to go to this well-known Delirium Café near the Grand Square with some of the alumni of our master’s programme. After a round of tasting local Belgian beers, we went to see the Manneken Pis and get some Belgian waffles. Then we headed to some other local bars to see Belgian night-life before starting a three-days of conference which I will tell you in my next blog.

In the end, this trip was a really good experience. We got closer with each other and had some marvellous memories! Besides, we had the chance to explore the capital of Europe together with my classmates.

Have you ever been to Brussels? Do you have any funny stories about your school trip? Drop a comment below and let us know!