Farewell, Europe!

Boarding the Eurostar for London
at the Gare du Midi, Brussels

As I start to write this, we have just pulled out of Lille-Europe station on the Eurostar from Brussels to London (our 19th train ride since I started counting), moving rapidly backwards through the French countryside, land of the trenches in the 1st World War more than 100 years ago. We just passed a little cemetery full of white gravestones which may have had something to do with it.
The weather is calm and sunny at last.

EU Parliament buildings from the
Parc Léopold

This morning after breakfast at EXKi on the rue Neuve, horrified by a family of beggars (refugees?) sleeping together on that scruffy shopping street, we left our luggage at the hotel and walked through the Botanical Gardens, the bottom end of which we saw yesterday, and then continued towards an important part of the city, the area around the European Parliament. We found the back entrance to the Parliament where school parties were lining up to go inside for a tour, and where other school children were playing games of basketball in the Parc Léopold. I found the street map confusing, lost my sense of direction again. There's another, more formal park opposite the Belgian Parliament, the Parc de Bruxelles., from which we found our way to the rue Royale and thence back to the Rogier district.

Back entrance to the EU Parliament

Belgian Parliament building

From the Place Rogier to the Gare du Midi was an easy short tram ride underground, now that we know how to get through the platform barriers. Where to tap the ticket is not intuitively obvious; we noticed that we weren't the only travellers to have trouble with this. There we went through the passport checks and left Europe; the formalities are still quite relaxed in spite of Brexit, and our British-European e-passports opened the gates automatically.

Paul Henri Spaak, Père Fondateur de L'Europe:
"This time, the men of western Europe

[...] have done something great, and what 

is remarkable and perhaps unique is that 

they have done is by renouncing any use

of force, any constraint, any threat."

On the 1957 Treaty of Rome

We have now reached the station at Calais, where three uniformed soldiers with automatic rifles appear to be keeping watch over the fences and tracks. Armed soldiers were on duty at the Gare du Midi as well. The fences are topped with rolls of barbed wire. A little boy in the seat in front of us is showing us his collection of toy vehicles ... and now we are in the Chunnel, 75 metres below the water's surface and already half way from Europe to Britain; I have put my watch back one hour. We shall surface at "Ebbsfleet International", a place that didn't exist when I was young, on our way to "Londen" (the display on the screen is still half in Flemish).
We're through to our homeland: more high fences all around us, and a white horse drawn on the chalk hillside on this section of the South Downs. It looks new.