Recently I attended the European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS’12) in Brussels. While of course the conference took the majority of the day, there was chance to go explore a bit of the city in the evening thanks to the excellent transport system.

A ten journey ticket cost €13 and a journey is any amount or combinations of bus, tram or metro in one hour. More than enough to get somewhere. I’d deliberately tried to travel light so relied on the camera phone rather than my digital. While the phone was a lot easier to carry it definitely lacked some helpful features of the proper camera like being able to control exposure properly.

But good enough. Some evenings were out in restaurants with fellow attendees, some were just a gentle wander, something from a non-tourist eatery and sitting in a local café sampling the beers.

The Belgians do great chips (frites) and great beer. What more do you want? The conference closed on the Friday night after which I enjoyed a brilliant free music and light-show event in the city along with some other attendees. After that late night partying it was up early to check out of the hotel, dump the luggage in a locker at the rail station and then join a bicycle tour of the city. It’s a really great way to see the city and many of the photos were taken on that tour. The behaviour of cars and pedestrians to cyclists is really very different to that in the UK and it didn’t particularly need much cycle specific infrastructure.

Then back to Brussels-Midi to catch the uneventful (apart from someone falling asleep and snoring loudly) Eurostar back. All rather tiring but an enjoyable and useful week.