Work trip to Brussels, Belgium - 21st to 22nd April 2008

There can't be much better than waking up on a Monday morning and having to go to Brussels, surely. Not only do you have the normal Monday blues, made even worse by the hangover from the Camden Crawl, but you have to sit on a Eurostar for a couple of hours, with not much reward at the end of it. Luckily, it was a nice sunny day in Brussels, which can actually look quite attractive when things are like that.

Apparently there was a fish convention on in the city whilst I was there - very strange. This did however mean that there were very few hotel rooms available (I didn't know that many people were interested in fish), so I was forced to stay in a hotel on the very outskirts of the city. If you have any choice in the matter (which I think the person that booked my room did not), avoid the Gosset Hotel at all costs. Right on the edge of town, in an industrial estate, and next to the ring road, it was clean enough - but pretty hellish, and bad value for €200 a night. Very poor!

The only other thing of note that happened in this trip was that I got to see Anderlecht's football ground, which is in the middle of a very nice park. It would be good to go there with Arsenal for a European game by the look of it, maybe for a nice Champions League qualifier in August, when the weather is good over there.

Other than that, this was one of those routine trips, the ones that make work travel a drag - all work and no play, and a tour of some of the lowlights of Brussels into the bargain. It can be a really nice city, but sadly I didn't get to see or do anything good on this trip.