Our first European holiday together since before the pandemic started in the early hours of Thursday 1st September. Captain Caveman had fallen asleep on the sofa but I woke him up in time for our taxi to the airport. Fikri was on time and we were off to Dalaman at 1.45am, it was going to be a long day. When we arrived at Dalaman airport we were early and the check-in desk didn’t open until 2 hours before the flight instead of the 3 hours we were expecting. It took a lot of willpower not to fall asleep, stood up in the queue.
We checked in and were due to fly at 5.35am to Dusseldorf, the airport has no free drinking water which is a bit poor and we had to buy bottled water.
We both managed a little sleep on the plane but it was only for a couple of hours at the most.
We landed at 8.15am in Dusseldorf and were asked the purpose for our visit as we went through passport control. Captain Caveman was asked how long he planned on staying. I was surprised that Dusseldorf airport didn’t seem that clean to say we were in Germany. We got a train from the airport, €3 each, to Dusseldorf Central station then walked for about 10 minutes to the bus station. We found a cafe which seemed to have some dodgy dealing rough characters outside. We bought a big bottle of water, a double espresso (for Captain Caveman) and a sandwich each for €7.50. We weren’t staying in Germany, we had a Flixbus booked to Brussels in Belgium. We left around 1pm, the bus was great; comfy seats, free WiFi and only 3 hours.
When we got off in Brussels we found that we needed coins to get on the tram or metro, we didn’t have any so we walked. We were peckish so we went to a place called Wolf in the town centre. We shared dim sum and got ourselves a beer. The dim sum were €5.50 for 3 so it wasn’t super cheap but they were very nice and we had 6 between us. We also got a pulled pork Bao, €7.50 each and one more beer each. I thought the Wolf logo on the glasses looked more like a thirsty dog. We walked to our hotel around 4pm and checked in to a nice room with a kitchenette. The Citadines Sainte Catherine aparthotel was great and would be a good location for what we had planned in Brussels.
We decided to have a little lay down but fell asleep and missed dinner – we were very tired.
joloyolo 