Its Monday, the Belgian's Must Be On Strike

We arrived at the train station early, all ready to take the Thalys bullet train to Paris, only to find out that the rail workers in Belgium had called a general strike which shut down any outgoing train service from Holland to France...because all trains have to pass through Belgium. The station agent was tired, having answered endless inquiries since 3, but she was cheerful in a sort of fatalistic way.

So we shrugged and headed back to the hotel, got our same room back and then spent the afternoon writing postcards and catching up on rest. I also hopped on the internet to see if I could find out more about the strike.

I Googled "Belgium, Rail strike" and waited tensely for the results. I received many hits and I figured that "Well, this is a big thing, look at all the articles!" that is until I started checking the dates of the articles...October 6, Jun 10, May 14, April, February...the Belgians seem to go on strike quite a bit, and while it causes a great deal of disruption, they never seem to actually achieve anything with their strikes, aside from perhaps getting an extra three day weekend on a fairly regular basis. (Hopefully they haven't planned to travel that weekend).

I scanned the rest of the news to find that CNN, BBC and the rest of the international news sources were very uninterested in the latest Belgian trainworkers little tantrum.

My friend had since told me "Now you have really experienced European travel."

We will leave today without disruption I am sure, because as far as I can see, the strikers seemed to have failed to bring he European Union to its knees.