Episode 5: The Brussels Incident

I finally got a cup of tea!

Thank you Belgium; at last a country which understands the most important part of breakfast.

Anyway... The plan for Brussels was something like: European Parliament, comic book museum, chocolate, waffles, heckle Nigel Farage if he's around. The actual itinerary consisted of bouncing back and forth between the British embassy and a couple of police stations, trying to file an incident report.

Yes, we've had our first official incident. Trying to work out the French on the police forms nearly caused a second. Being the go-between for the police and the embassy didn't help matters either. Each organisation seemed to think the other was responsible for resolving our query.

The upshot is that our tour of Brussels was curtailed slightly. We did find a waffle shack: an Australian one, but whatever.

So we set off for Utrecht in the late afternoon, checked into our hotel and headed off to our first football match of the trip. Anyone who cares will already know how the game went so I won't go into detail but it was one of the best matches we've ever been to, because of our fellow spectators rather than the game itself (though that was good too).

When you're sharing a stand with the Scotland fans you can usually expect humour and we were not disappointed. I've never experienced Do-Re-Mi as a football chant before but it works surprisingly well.

Also on display was banter with everyone from the stadium stewards to an England coach who was sat nearby to the British TV presenters also in the vicinity - all good-humoured and well received, I must add. I've never laughed so much at a football game.

Half-time gave us the chance to sample some local dishes such as rookworst broodje and saucijzebroodje (hot dog and sausage roll - so exotic; still, a step up from McDonalds the other day).

And that was about it until I sat down to write this at midnight but was sidetracked by Chris' sudden panic attack over whether our car would be legally allowed into German cities. We now believe it will but I guess the test will come tomorrow when we attempt to enter our first German city. We're so well-prepared, it's unbelievable.

Stay tuned, our next "incident" may just be around the corner.