Brussels

I went to Brussels for the first time ever last week. In fact it was a journey of firsts - first time in Brussels, first time in Belgium and first time on Eurostar. For someone who's done quite a lot of America and the Caribbean, I'm suprisingly poorly travelled on my home continent, so this was quite a big deal for me.

In one way, I could sum up the 24 hour trip as thus: tube, train, taxi, hotel, sister office, client office, taxi, train, tube, bus, home. That's actually a pretty accurate description, which meant the only bits of Brussels I really got to see were a long straight road with offices on it, a couple of motorways, and a fairly average train station and hotel.

So yes, that's one way to describe it, but it doesn't really include the real story - the fun and interesting bits from my perspective, of which there were three.

Firstly, Eurostar. Despite the fact that it has a habit of breaking down whenever the temperature gets a tad nippy, it's always held an aura of mystique for me. What I was particularly excited about was the idea of travelling at 186mph - the fact I've been on a plane going three times as fast didn't really compare with the idea of watching the countryside whizzing by at unbelievable speed.

In the end, I was actually a bit disappointed, only because 186mph didn't look that different from 125mph that Britain's best trains trundle along at. But even then I got a suprise out of the journey - the Channel Tunnel freaked me out. I'm not normally claustrophobic, but the idea of being under the sea for 30-odd minutes in a tunnel had a strangely unnerving effect on me. I definitely want to do it again though.

The second thing was the hotel bar. I've never quite worked out the economics of these places - they get 10 customers a night at best, employ a couple of staff and don't charge overly outrageous price, but still exist. What they do do fantastically well is bring people together. And so it was that I spent a great evening with one colleague I vaguely knew, one I'd never met, and one I'd spoken to for the first time on the phone barely two days previously (the Hoegaarden may or may not have helped with this).

And thirdly was meeting the prospective client we'd come several hundred miles at 186mph to see. The best thing about my job is having to learn a hell of a lot about something in a wonderfully short time - it's a bit like cramming for an exam that you've missed all the lectures for and have a week to shove as much information down your throat as possible.

The other thing I love about this is that when you meet these prospective clients, you're struck by just how much they know about their company, and how much they care about it all. It's brilliant just to sit in the room observing and interacting with this and I don't think I'll ever get bored of it.

So perhaps instead of summing up the trip as I have done above, I should instead do it like this:

Super fast train, scray tunnel, social bliss aided by alcohol and neverending awe at knowledge and the passion behind it - now that's what I call a trip.