Day Two of the bus – Belgium

Bob Simms has won a seat on the Born to Learn bus tour of Europe, ending at Tech Ed in Berlin.

Friday 30^th October

It was not a good night.  I’d managed a decent hour’s sleep as the bus rode the train through the Chunnel, but woken as the bus hit the road again.  It was an unfamiliar bed, the engine droned and the bus rocked.  I dozed in snatches until I awoke and it was clear I wasn’t going to sleep again.  I slipped my jeans on over my pyjamas, grabbed my laptop and sneaked downstairs.  My watch said it was half past five.  We, the British, invented time in Greenwich.  That’s why it’s called Greenwich Mean Time, because, well, Greenwich means ‘time’.  It’s probably Latin or something.  Before that things just happened all at once, or not at all, which is terribly, terribly un-British.  Due to the awkwardness of the Continentals in refusing to accept that, it meant it was half past six local time.  We were behind schedule because a problem had forced the bus into a diversion on the English side of the Channel.  I spent the pre- and post-dawn hours with my companion, Mr Laptop.

Around half past eight my tardy fellow travellers roused themselves.  Liberty, Dave, Christopher, Tjeerd and I were dropped off at a hotel to shower and have breakfast.  We took turns in the two rooms we had.  I was last in, with ten minutes to spare.  Well, to be fair, I had less work to make myself gorgeous.  Then we caught a cab to today’s host, Info Support, a training company.

Again I was a little bit of a fifth wheel, so I occupied myself conducting a few interviews with the management and staff.  One of them was conducted in Dutch.  That was bizarre, as I had no idea what the answers to my questions were.  I kept expecting him to tell me, ‘but I’ve already told you that.’  It seemed to go well, though.

Later that morning I finally got to meet Ken, a Microsoft Evangelist (yes, they actually have that as a job title) with whom I had shared many an e-encounter but had only previously met for five seconds across a crowded conference hall.  He had fully recovered from a bout of bus belly, and was rejoining the crew.

Then there was swag.  Let me explain about swag.  At these events, as a thank you for attending and as an incentive to come in the first place, we have giveaways.  In return for filling out a questionnaire attendees at this event get a T-shirt, stickers, hats, and so forth.  The more cynical have assigned the interpretation ‘So What, Another Give-away’ to the word.  Out hosts, dishing out our swag to their attendees, decided to offer their own swag to us as a thanks for bringing the tour here.  We each received a little flashing LED light for a bicycle, and a Lego brick.  Wait, not just any Lego brick.  This one had a USB drive built into it.  Oh my gosh!  How cool is that?

Outside the training centre stood a fake steam engine.  It opened up to become a french fry stand.  The Belgians take their fries seriously, claiming to have invented them, though quite why they coat them in mayonnaise is a mystery.  Our hosts laid on free fries for our lunch.  Free!  My favourite kind of fries.  Tjeerd guided me in through the Belgian culinary minefield that presented itself to me.  He recommended a sausage-type meat product, though he was reticent about its exact composition.  Then the delegates crowded around the bus, snapping at us.  Flushed with the reception at York, we stood in the doorway and waved goodbye.  Two people waved back.  The Belgians are almost English in their reserve.

The next stop was a higher education establishment a forty-five minute journey away in Gent. Melissa was in contact with the sponsors.  There was a crowd of one hundred and fifty students waiting to greet the arrival of the bus.  Some had queued for two hours.  We were rockstars again.  Chris took a video camera to the front of the bus.  There was the venue.  We braced ourselves as we were guided into our parking spot.  The bus was mobbed by …three people.

Change of plan.  The parking spot was a few hundred metres from the venue.  We made our way on foot.  Ah, there was the crowd, massed around the entrance to the hall.  They looked hungrily at the box of T-shirts I was carrying.  I became nervous.

The delegates were ushered into a lecture hall.  My job for the afternoon was security.  I stood guard over the array of get-on-the-bus hats, T-shirts stickers and fake tattoos.  Yes, really, fake tattoos bearing the get-on-the-bus shield.

A woman who sounded remarkably like Joanna Lumley approached the stand and introduced herself.  She was from Microsoft EU.  We chatted about the tour.  She was surprised I was not a Microsofty, but had won my place on the bus.  I think she was impressed, too, though there was just a suggestion of my wife’s incredulity at wanting the prize in the first place.

A little later she approached me again, two men in tow.  She wanted to post a short video on the bus tour.  Would I like to star in a video about it?  Would I?  Are bears Catholic?  Does the Pope …wait, anyway, yes, I would love to.

We stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine and I shivered in my official T-shirt as she asked me a series of questions.  I was erudite.  I was learned.  I was a little video star.

“Is that okay?” she asked her cameraman.

The cameraman fiddled with the camera.

“Sorry guys, my battery is dead.  Let me change it and we’ll have to start again from the top.  I didn’t get a word of that.”

We started from the top, and I was magically transformed into a mumbling idiot.  There’s something about repeating word-for-word phrases you’d just uttered ad-hoc that makes them stilted and awkward.

Tjeerd sent Chris (the other winner) and me off to the bus to record the inside and to do a ‘meet Bob’ short to camera.  My favourite take was standing at the foot of the stairs, Chris only able to film my torso as my head disappeared up the stairwell, saying how this was the only spot on the bus I could stand up straight.  Bizarrely, Melissa, who looks to be five feet tall in heels, has the only head injury on the bus.  The only one who can stand up straight pretty much anywhere in the bus has hit her head on a carpeted bulkhead, leaving a small carpet burn on her otherwise flawless features.  She’s self conscious about it.  Sorry.  I shouldn’t have mentioned it, I suppose.  Forget I said anything.  Try not to stare.  Though, you know, from my height it’s awfully difficult not to.  No, no, just pretend it’s not there.

Then we returned to the hall in time to dish out the swag to the attendees as they left the hall.

“What size shirt do you want?  Are you sure?  They’re American sizes.  A beanie hat?  Sure.  What about a sticker.  Oh and take a fake tattoo.  Take two.  Go on, the chicks go wild for nerds with tattoos.”

We ran out of hats.  There were few shirts left.  Strangely, people hadn’t really gone for the whole tattoo thing though.

There are strict laws about how many hours a bus driver can drive.  If we wanted to make it to Amsterdam we had two hours for dinner.  Two hours, no longer.  Two hours, okay?  Dave and Melissa had this thing going on, where Dave wanted to leave at a certain time to beat the traffic, to comply with the driving laws, to make the journey as smooth as possible.  Melissa needed to make sure the sponsors were happy, to shepherd the crew back to the bus, to catch just five minutes more of reliable Internet time.  So the two were constantly clashing heads, in an I’m-going-to-beat-you-to-death-but-we’ll-laugh-about-it-later sort of way.  Having gained Ken we said goodbye to Dave the Exchange guru.  He was off to see some long-lost relatives, his time on the bus done.

So we all trooped off for some dinner, the crew and the other Dave the Driver.  The first Dave the Driver didn’t want anything.  “I always get sleepy after eating an evening meal,“ he explained.  We didn’t think it a good idea to push it.

We passed a chocolate shop.  Liberty had been looking for one since we entered Belgium.  Not for herself, you understand.  She was anxious to let all and sundry know it was for her husband.  Sure.  Most of the party followed her inside.  Dave the Driver and I stood outside and chatted.  He remarked on the window display.  We have chocolate mice in the UK, but who would want to eat the chocolate rats on display?  But this was the Netherlands, of course, home to Hamlin and its pied piper.

We found a small kebab shop and piled in.  We were in the Flemish part of Belgium.  Flemish, Tjeerd assured us, was just the same as Dutch, but with a different accent.  He would translate for us.  He ordered the thin sausages I’d had for lunch as a starter, and then recommended the French Hamburger.

A long and protracted conversation occurred between Tjeerd and the cafe owner.  It see-sawed between Flemish and French.  There was much writing of orders and scratching them out on his notepad.

“The problem is,“ explained Tjeerd as the owner left, “he speaks Dutch and French, but neither at all well.  We’ll have to see what arrives.”

What arrived were six French Hamburgers and Dave’s Doner kebab.  I’ve noticed this when dining abroad.  Whenever I’ve eaten at a ‘foreign’ restaurant, the food is subtly different to reflect the country.  Hence an Indian restaurant will serve different style curries in America, France and England, for instance.  Dave’s Doner was in a hamburger bun instead of the pitta bread we were expecting.  The French Hamburgers, though!

Imagine a loaf.  Fill it with slices of hamburger.  Then cover that with french fries.  Then cover liberally with a spicy tomato sauce.  Et voila! (or whatever ‘et voila’ is in Foreign).  Chris, the Frenchman with us, shook his head in wonder.

“I don’t know what that is, but whatever it is, it is not French!” he informed us.

“No, but it is.  Look, it says it here, on the menu.  Look.  French Hamburger.  So it must be.  You can’t argue with it.”

We arrived back at the bus half an hour early.  Dave the Driver – okay, look, this is getting too confusing.  I’m going to reassign the designations.  The Dave that joined us in England is Scottish, so now although there are two Daves, and they are both bus drivers, the Dave who joined us for dinner is henceforth Scottish Dave, and the Dave that stayed on the bus is Dave the Driver.  Clearer now?  Good.  Okay, so Dave the Driver who isn’t Scottish and who remained on the bus, although he wasn’t actually driving it at the time, greeted us with amazement.

“You’re early!  What happened?  What’s going on?”

We boarded, Dave started up the engine and we were off to Amsterdam.

It was Friday evening.  The weekend was ours.  We were going to sleep in a hotel with real beds, where the ground stood still and I could walk erect like a human again.  I’d found that even in Belgium I swayed slightly in time to the bus, even as I walked outside.

I’d brought a selection of DVDs with me, because I didn’t know if the DVD players on the bus would play American region DVDs.  One of them was Monty Python’s Holy Grail, arguably the funniest Python film ever.  Whenever I have travelled abroad I have discovered the British have an unequalled reputation for humour.  The two Gods of comedy worshipped by Johnny Foreigner?  Monty Python and Benny Hill.  Python I can understand, though the humour is sometimes a little dated now.  We are embarrassed, though, about Benny Hill.  Running around in fast-mo after scantily clad women, smacking short bald people on the head is not funny to us anymore, yet the number of times Johnny Foreigner has thanked me for him, as if he were my creation.

So Tjeerd voted to pass the time watching the Holy Grail on the DVD.  We placed it into the player in the downstairs lounge.  Bear in mind, this bus was often used to transport musicians on tour.  Snoop Dog was the passenger previous to us.  Let me tell you, the surround system rocked!  Even for a film made in the seventies, it was out of this world.  Yet I still caught myself nodding at some of the scenes, unable to keep my eyes open.  The sleep debt collection agency was sending the boys round, and they would not accept an IOU for much longer.

We dropped Tjeerd off in the middle of nowhere.  He was going to spend the weekend with family, as he now lived in the States.  We continued to Amsterdam and congregated in the foyer, Ken, Melissa, Liberty, Chris and I.  This was to be our home for two nights, and then we would relocate to another hotel on Sunday.  We were sharing rooms and I was sharing with Chris.  The room names, though, were under the Microsoft employees who made the bookings.  The clerk changed the booking for our room to reflect who was actually staying there.  I looked at the form I was asked to sign.  For the next two days, apparently, Chris was going to be sharing a room with ‘Melissa Simms’.  For the briefest moment I considered making a joke about how natural it sounded to partner Melissa’s first name with my surname, but we were all too tired and I really didn’t wanted to make myself more of a wise-ass in her eyes.  I was only glad they changed it to a twin from a queen-size double.  This was Amsterdam, after all.

We stumbled up to the room and performed our ablutions.  The twin beds were pushed up next to each other.  For the first time in thirty years I asked, ‘Which side of the bed do you prefer?’  Then my head hit the pillow (the left in case you were interested) and I was asleep.