Namur - Day 46

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While I was in Bruges, I decided that I wanted to get over to Luxemburg on my way to Paris. I made two stops on the way: Brussels (we know how that went) and Namur.

I took a morning train from Brussels and got in to Namur in the early afternoon. I didn't have a map, but I knew that the hostel was along the river a couple kms from the station. I set off using my compass and eventually stumbled upon a river. I knew that there were two rivers in the town, and this one wasn't flowing the direction I expected it to be, so I assumed I had come across the wrong river. I followed the flow of the river and quickly came across the confluence with the much larger river and was able to get my bearings. I followed the river for maybe 20 minutes and managed to find the HI hostel adjacent to the water.

I checked in to the hostel and dropped my bag since the rooms were closed until after 4. Since I had a bunch of time to kill, I decided to check out the sights. The main attraction in the town is the Citadel, which is a huge fortress perched on a hill overlooking the confuence 50 meters below. The entire complex is free, and open to exploring, and so I spent a couple hours walking around checking out the cool old buildings and the wonderful views of the town and surrounding countryside. Eventually I got bored and walked down into town in search of food. After some wandering, I settled on a kebab place, which had about 15 sauces to choose from. Of course, my french is really limited and they didn't speak any english, so I ended up settling on a ketchup sauce. I was skeptical, but when I had the first bite I was pleasantly suprised. Maybe it was just that the kebab in Brussels had been so bad, but this one was awesome.

With my immediate hunger taken care of, I went in search of more food for later. I tracked down a grocery store and collected some supplies before returning to the hostel to move into my room. As it turns out, I was the only one in my room when I got there. I spent some time online and then had dinner before heading back to the room since the hostel was basically empty. About 10pm I had decided that no one else was going to show up and I was getting ready for bed when someone started pounding on the door. I opened it and was greeted by a middle-aged, large, chain-smoking, Belgian man who spoke no english. His only possessions consisted of a plastic shopping bag which he was carefully guarding. He quickly decided to go to bed and turned out the light leaving me wondering where I went wrong to go from having an empty room to this at 10pm.

Oh well, I figured, it's no big deal, I wanted to go to sleep anyway. That's when he started snoring. Loudly. Earplugs are only good for so much, and it took me quite a while to get to sleep. In the morning, he was up nice and early and went downstairs for at least 20 minutes to smoke. When he came back, he rummaged through his bag and produced a bottle of whiskey. I sat there watching silently as he took several swigs and put it back in his bag. I joked, "starting early, eh?" and pointed at the bottle, which of course he didn't understand and he offered some to me, which I was happy to turn down. It's crazy the people you end up running across in hostels sometimes.

After some breakfast I hoofed it to the train station, and I was on my way to Luxemburg, so stay tuned for that.

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