Waterloo

Today I had the day off work because it was a bank holiday in Belgium, so I got up late in the morning, after listening to relaxing panpipe music from Peru. One of my housemates are moving out in a few days, so an American girl was having a look around. There is also a French girl and a Dutch guy who is interested in the room, but it would be nice to have at least one non-European in the house. After breakfast I played a little Playstation 3 before I was invited to go to Waterloo for the day, I decided to go as it would be a nice trip on my day off.

I have been there before so I offered to be the tour guide, my housemates seemed happy with this. But I think they may have regretted it in the end. We left the house and caught the train to Waterloo, after trying to find the correct ticket office and platform. Buying a ticket in Brussels is sometimes not as easy as the UK! We arrived in Waterloo and found it under a grey sky but there was no heavy rain, it was only spitting (which is a new word I introduced to Monrose).

I remembered how to get to the battlefield and I started to lead the way. We had a quick stop at a memorial church for the soldiers who fell at the battle. It was quite a nice church with a classical appearance on the outside. Then we continued to walk along a road towards the field, which was much longer than I thought! After about half an hour walking we asked who long it was until we arrived and was told that it was another 15 minutes...by bus.

It seemed much closer last time and this is way I think my housemates regretted believing me on the distance. However we kept on walking and finally got to the field at around 4pm. We brought our tickets to enter the museum and I was happy to sit down in the theatre after all that walking to watch a film and documentary about the battle. I knew a lot about it anyway from my many years studying history. Then we were hoping to do the battlefield tour but the bus was broken so we started to climb a big hill which has a statue of a lion at the top which was built around 1823 as a memorial to the battle. You can see the whole field from the top but anyway who has been there will know about the amount of stairs you need to conquer first.

Then we made our descend back to earth and we all voted to catch a taxi back to the station to begin our journey back to Brussels, it was almost one of the best things I have ever voted for. I had better stop it here as I need to have some dinner and start packing as tomorrow I am going back to the UK to catch up with the Borneo Team in Birmingham.