We're coming up on year since the first big air trip in a long time which I really looked forward to as a trip itself. I've driven to a few conferences over the last several years and that has been fun, but driving, and on a schedule, has a sense of pressure and requires a constant level of attention and performance that really diminishes it compared to flying or rail travel in particular.
As with so much of our international travel, we tacked some vacation on to professional travel--there was a conference in Brussels, so we went early. Ever so briefly, we flew into Amsterdam and visited there for a few days. Then, we took the Thalys high-speed rail line down to Brussels. We stayed in Brussels for the length of the conference before returning back through Amsterdam.
We didn't get really to see any of Wallonia, so the only French we encountered was in Brussels itself. Nor did we see any other towns in the Netherlands or in Flanders, except the very briefest glimpse from the train, which, to be sure, was nice enough.
One very specific, practical thing that stands out for me was the first experience I had trying to buy transit tickets to get us from the train station, Brussels Midi-Sud, up to the tram stop near the hotel. The selection mechanism at the self-serve kiosks really threw me for a while.
I got to a certain point in the process of buying the tickets where I was required to choose from amongst some options, but I had the hardest time figuring out how to indicate my selection! Poke, poke, no it isn't a touch screen. But where are the buttons? The only ones I saw were specialized, for instance, to start over (which, inadvertently, I ended up doing probably more than once). Turns out the big round thing in front that I had been pushing on was a dial. Now, I understand dials fine--one of my favorite arcade video games of all time is Tempest, which features a wonderfully weighty dial. This dial, though, wasn't a simple cylinder, perhaps with a little bit of nurling around the edge to improve grip. Instead, it had this complex sloping cross section, with a disk in the center, then dropping a step down before hitting a complex curve that finally turned over and all the way down at the outside edge. So, I think I could be forgiven for not immediately intuiting its function. Turns out, I'm not alone in having trouble with these things.
I found that when looking for pictures of these machines that I might be able to include here, but so far no luck. If you follow those links, though, I think you can well see the dial in question.
With that all sorted I managed to get our tickets, but not before someone--a Brit by the sound of it--was exclaiming about the delay, loudly and rudely enough that I turned around and asked if we needed to have a conversation about it all, or could I just get on with finishing my (by then almost complete) transaction? He decided it was probably best just to let me finish, thank goodness, so off we (eventually) went.
(Also, other folks clearly manage to use these things just fine, even on first use, so I'm not sure if my experience is general enough to add a gentle advisory at the Brussels Wikivoyage page.)