Brussels; Sunday, 23 December, 2007

Having checked out of the hotel and dumped my bags into a left luggage locker at Gare du Midi, I caught the bus out of town.

Located about 12Km to the South of Brussels in the Walloon (French Speaking) region of Belgium, is a small, and at first glance, quite standard Euro town (i.e. it has the same identikit list of shops that is present in virtually every town from Galway to Tallinn). However, it’s name tells of a more interesting and important past. The town is Waterloo and it was in fields to the south of here that a new Europe was created.

Just outside the town is the Lion Monument, around which are a host of tourist attractions that explain the details and history of the battle. In a distilled format, Napoleon having previously being deposed and sent into exile has come back and is still intent on taking over the world, a coalition of the willing was formed to “Regime change” France (heard any of these phrases before?) A combination of British, Dutch, Prussian and other nations combined to taken on the French. In June 1815, in a field outside of Waterloo the French met the British and Dutch forces. Battle raged for over ten hours, but the tide turned towards the end when the Prussians arrived and eventually the French retreated in disarray, Napoleon himself only just escaped capture by the Prussians, and eventually surrendered himself to the British who promptly exiled him again, this time permanently.

The battle ended French power in Europe, effectively lead to the creation of modern day Belgium and Germany, and for a while, appeared to bring peace to the continent. It would be nearly 100 years before serious fighting broke out again.

Today you can take it all in in a “spectacular” audio-visual presentation (their use of the word spectacular, not mine!) climb the lion monument to get views over the battlefield, and go on a tour of the main areas of the battle on the equivalent of an off-road land train. After having done all of these, and a few other things, I had effectively exhausted all there was to do in Waterloo so I caught the bus back into Brussels. Unfortunately, it appeared that most of the rest of Wallonia were also heading into Brussels, on the same bus. I only just got on and then had to spend a long 90 minutes (which was odd as the outward journey had only been 45 minutes) standing up jammed into a packed bus.

By the time I arrived back into Brussels there was just enough time to pay a quick visit to the Mannekin-Pis who was in his finest Christmas clothes, before heading back to the Gare du Midi to pick up my bags and catch the train home.