Day One - London to Brussels

Our journey got off to an inauspicious start, ill-timed as to commence on the first sunny day in England since the Queen's golden Jubliee.

Arriving at the spanking new St Pancras fills you with a disconcerting mixture of sentiments; modernity meeting nostalgia. Even though the glass-walled shops nestled in between the great brick buttresses of William Henry Barlow's shed are no more exotic than Thomas Pink and a cluster of WHSmiths, the terminus is undeniably grandiose. It fills you with pride that this - save for the graffitied concrete barriers of New Cross, which make the Gaza Strip look like Butlins - is the first structure of any significance that a foreigner will see upon entering London.

Starting the trip in style, we enjoy a glass of the Champagne Bar's second cheapest, amid business shirekers and ladies who are either going on or arriving from holiday and therefore feel comfortable quaffing bottles of fizz at 10.30 in the morning.

I've never been cowardly enough to take the eurostar before; my fear of flying having only recently precipitated, I used to gutsily board flying sarchophagi to risk my life in the name of two weeks of sunburn on a Spanish beach. I certainly have never taken the Eurostar from its swanky new home.

We were through check-in and security with the minimum of fuss or faff and as we boarded the train I was constantly expecting something to go awry. Being used to train travel in the UK, it's difficult to see the travel glass as half-full when you've had the whole thing poured over you in a flurry of penalty fares and replacement bus services.

Remarkably, the whole thing worked - from London to Brussels in under two hours. No delays, no crammed carriages and no rickey drinks trolley on which to bash your elbow.

Brussels is an odd place. It, like the constitution it is home to, cannot really make up its mind as to what it stands for. As the legislative capital of the EU, one would expect an amount of cosmopolitanism, if only to make the swarths of besuited diplomats feel fleetingly at home. Not at home of course; their wives live there and not the escorts they've picked up at the Hotel Metropole.

Upon every stree their is a clutch of English, Spanish, German and French brands as if to cement the ultimate realisation of the European Union's as having a Zara and H&M on every street corner. We even saw a Gregg's bakery, obviously wishing to expand beyond its 507 shops om Leeds. That's EU trade law for you.

Mulitfaceted culture is probably a good thing, but it shouldn't be at the detriment to national identity. Claire ''I don't think eight cardigans is excessive" Jones began the afternoon by firing off a number of hasty generalisations about the Belgians, including: "Belgians really do dress poorly," and "There's nothing that is typically Belgian." Save possibly for chocolate and waffles, she's probably right.

It's a short walk from our Van Gogh Hostel into the centre of town, which is flecked with nuggets of Flemish architectural grandeur scattered among building sites and high-rise car parks. The buildings of Brussels are the equivalent of someone throwing a handful of pearls into a bucket of sick.

I'd read about a bar called "Mort Subite", or 'Sudden Death' likely owing to the strength of the beer. We were accosted as we arrived by a brusque waitress, fag in one hand menu pressed beneath the other bingo-wing. She rather too forcefully recommended a 'Gueze' which tasted like a shandy made instead with vinegar.

One heartening thing about Belgian bars is their lax enforcement of the smoking ban. Officially outlawed inside buildings, smoking is encouraged by great dustbin-lids of ashtrays placed sometimes immediately aside non-smoking tables.

We wandered the streets in the waning light, vainly trying to get a feel for the place. Each decorative street was sporadically fissured with another building site or carpark. Along neon lit boulevards we saw hawkish waiters fishooking punters, trawling them into their overpriced seafood restaurants.

We tentatively entered a restaurant with book-lined walls and gingham tablecloths. As we waited an age to be shown a menu, I glanced over to the next table to see a small dog licking clean the plate of an effeminate and lonely man. We decided to head for pastures cleaner.

Eating mussels in Brussels, I for some reason was reminded of Jean Claude van Damme, and spent a large chunk of the night racking my brains for other famous Belgians. Didn't get much further than Kim Clijsters and Hercule Poirot.

We eventually stumbled upon a small cluster of cafes and bars to the south of the centre, full of unaffected youngsters gathering for stolen moments armed with cigarettes and urn-shaped beer glasses. Places like these were sorely missing across the rest of the city.

Still feeling like we were going on holiday in the morning (Brussels, it seems will forever remain little more than a transit hub for Europe's less convoluted cultural destinations) we opted for a little bar, "Booze and Blues" which had a jukebox to melt Henry Winkler's jacket - all 50's rock 'n' roll and skiffle.

Tomorrow we head to Cologne, home of Europe's biggest Cathedral and far too many opulent beer halls. Photos to follow.