This year I attended the Brucon conference (0x0f edition) which was held in Mechelen, Belgium.
I posted an article about the conference itself but felt I should also share my experience from a tourist POV so here goes nothing.
I live in England and given that I have the option to use the EUROSTAR train to get to Belgium I figured it would be something cool to do. I left home on Sunday Sep. 24th at 6-ish AM in the morning and got to London St.Pancreas station at 8 AM -ish, went through the security check and border control and boarded the train. I left London at 9 AM -ish localtime and arrived in Belgium at 12 PM -ish local time (journey took about 2h). From there I took a local train which brought me to Mechelen at 1 PM -ish and by 2 PM – ish I was checked into the hotel. (the -ish’s are intentional as I can’t be bothered to fill in the actual time).
Later that day I met with other colleagues attending the conference and training with me and we had a nice walk through the town center and had dinner at one of the “tourist traps” – as we called them (where we enjoyed Belgian beer + amazing food).
Next day, Monday, first day of training, I had a massive breakfast at the hotel and skipped Lunch to check some of the local shops (had about 1.5h at my disposal to browse) after which I joined my colleagues for dinner and after that headed back to the hotel to get some well deserved rest.
As a matter of fact, the same pattern can be applied to the following days (Tue, We, Thu and Fr) as the training and the conference were very intense and I wanted to absorb as much information as I could. Pics from conference and venue are in a different post about Brucon specifically but I can say here that every dinner was different (Italian, Turkish, Japanese sushi place, Hawaiian, Thai )
On Saturday (Sep. 30 th) something else happened … me and a colleagues of mine wanted to check out the Cathedral tower (behind me in the second pic above) and that turned out to be quite special … see pics below.
After that it was time to go back home so we left for Brussels (got there around 12 PM ish ) and me and my colleagues parted ways (I was the odd one out here with the train and all). My train was scheduled to leave to London at 8 PM local time which was intentional on my part as I wanted to spend a few hours in the EU capital city.
I managed to find a locker in the train station for my massive backpack that was killing me and decided to walk in all directions from the train station to get a feel of the buildings and the local people and if I’m being honest it was not the best experience in the sense that it had some familiarity with other places I’ve seen before (Paris, Bucharest) and was expecting something else.
One thing that surprised me was that fact that I could buy cigarette packs of 35 and 48 cigs 🙂 . Last 2 pics below are also from Mechelen where I managed to find this weekend fair / open market
Overall it was an interesting experience, not sure I’ll do it again soon but I know there’s more to see, my colleagues recommended I try some of the iconic landmarks in Brussels and perhaps a visit to Bruges … we shall see 🙂