{"id":149,"date":"2013-11-04T22:57:21","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T21:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/?p=149"},"modified":"2013-11-10T19:59:21","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T18:59:21","slug":"day1roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/2013\/11\/04\/day1roundup\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 1 Round Up: The Journey to Brussels, and Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time I was in Belgium was passing through the country on the coach on a school trip to Germany in Summer 2006. Seven years later, and I am back in Belgium – this time for a longer stay.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a member of the Conservative Party<\/a>, I get the newsletters of all the MEPs for my region (South West England & Gibraltar<\/em>) in the post. This trip to Brussels came about after reading the newsletter of Ashley Fox MEP<\/a> – as he regularly organises trips to Brussels<\/a> for constituents.<\/p>\n

I was up very early in order to get the train to Salisbury for my pickup. I managed to get a direct train<\/a> at 05:51 this morning, arriving in Salisbury at 07:36, then walking round to the Millstream Car Park, where the coach picked me up at 08:00.<\/p>\n

\"Calais\"<\/a>We travelled to Dover<\/a> and boarded the Spirit of Britain<\/a> – a brand new ship which entered service just two years ago. It even has wi-fi on board<\/a>! The weather was really quite good during our journey: The first week in November, and I crossed the channel in bright sunshine: this gave me the perfect opportunity for a photo as we left Dover<\/a> – and another one of the beach as we arrived at Calais<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The final leg of our journey to Brussels was just over 2 hours long, we arrived at our destination – the 4* Thon Hotel Brussels City Center<\/a> – not long after 6. My room turned out to be on floor 11<\/a>. I’m not used to staying in a room so high up!<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Dinner this evening was at the hotel itself. I had (and I’ve got the menu next to me to make sure I get everything in the right place): a starter of pat\u00e9, followed by pork cutlett with three pepper sauce, and then finishing off with panacotta. So a big change to my usual student food of pasta bolognese, or chicken kiev with baked beans, or home made macaroni cheese then!<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the meal, and I’m pleased to report that I managed to chat to a few people at dinner as well. I’m generally quite shy around people I don’t know, but I actually quite enjoyed having an intelligent conversation about politics with 7 other people who I didn’t really know!<\/p>\n

We went from discussing the UK’s relationship with the EU, to the Scottish Independence referendum…at one point we were discussing who our favorite political broadcasters are…and as I’m the only student on the trip, a lot of people have been keen to find out how I became interested in politics.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow is the big political day. We’ll be visiting the European Parliament in the morning for speeches, then we’ll have a chance to explore Brussels, and then we’ve got dinner at the Scheltema restaurant with guest speaker Daniel Hannan MEP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is approaching midnight over here, so I’m off to bed.<\/p>\n

Good night.<\/p>\n

FH.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last time I was in Belgium was passing through the country on the coach on a school trip to Germany in Summer 2006. Seven years later, and I am back in Belgium – this time for a longer stay. As a member of the Conservative Party, I get the newsletters of all the MEPs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[18,17,9,27,26,30,7,10,28,29],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-calais","tag-coach","tag-conservative-party","tag-dinner","tag-dover","tag-ferry","tag-journey","tag-traveling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fred-hart.uk\/brussels2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}