The Brussels South Station Incident

by Tom Kando

Our European trip this time took us to three countries: We first visited Holland for a week, then we spent a week with our friends in rural Belgium, and then we moved on to Paris, France. 

For our weeks in Holland and in Belgium, we rented a car from Avis. But we didn’t want a car in Paris. Who needs a car in Paris?! No way!

So we drove our Avis car from Holland to Belgium, and we used it there for a week. Then, we planned to return the car in Belgium at the end of our visit to that country, and take the train there to Paris.

The train to Paris is the TGV, the Thalys bullet train. We had to catch it at the Brussels Midi Station - the South Station. So that’s where we also had to return the rented car.

On the morning of our departure from our friends’ house (about an hour outside of Brussels), we punched into the car’s GPS the address of the Avis rental car return at Brussels’ South Station: Rue de France 2.
We entered Brussels at mid-morning. The traffic was unreal. We crawled our way to the front of the South Station. There, the GPS told us that we had reached our destination.

Now what?

All we saw was one single massive, block-long building - the railroad station - surrounded by on-ramps, off-ramps, underground garages, skyscraper office buildings, parking lots, traffic jammed as far as the eye could see. Signs? Nothing intelligible. Avis rental office? Nowhere in sight. ANY car rental return signs? Nada. Niente. Rien. Nichts. Niks. Nothing.

I stopped by a curb. Cars behind me started to honk. I was not supposed to stop there.

Meanwhile, another problem was emerging: I had needed to go for three quarters of an hour already. It was getting almost unbearable. My bladder felt on the verge of explosion. I didn’t want to soil myself and the car. Nowhere in sight could I detect a facility that could accommodate me.

I became so desperate that I pulled the car into some sort of an alleyway connecting two major streets, and there I stopped and turned off the motor. I asked Anita to sit behind the wheel. I was going to walk into the huge station building and inquire as to where the rental car return was. I took off, forgetting to hand over the ignition key to Anita.

Once Inside the station, I saw a bathroom sign. I made a beeline for it. Thank God, that was now taken care of. Then, I started to run here and there, practically randomly, looking for any sort of “information” sign. Finally, a passer-by told me where the rental car return was: Deep down underground, a couple of floors BELOW the railroad station.

I ran back to our car in the alleyway, with Anita stuck without the ignition key. I had been gone for well over ten minutes. As I approached her, she was nearly hysterical, shouting at me incoherently, I guess trying to tell me what had happened to her during my absence. From what I gathered later, after she calmed down and told me the whole story, here is what happened during the ten minutes that I left her stranded:

The alleyway where I stopped the car was an important connection from one major thoroughfare to another. By stopping there, I was BLOCKING a large amount of traffic. A moment after I left Anita and the car, inadvertently taking the key with me, cars began to line up behind our car, wanting Anita to move, starting to honk and shout at her. But she couldn’t do anything, since I had the key. After a few minutes, three young men jumped out of a small truck stuck behind our car and started hollering at Anita furiously, in a language incomprehensible to her. Their garb suggested that they were Middle Easterners. When she gestured back that she couldn’t do anything because she didn’t have the key, one of them jumped onto the passenger seat of our car, sitting down next to Anita who was in the driver’s seat. He continued to shout at her unintelligibly.

Then it got worse. One of the other two men grabbed Anita and yanked her out of our car. He then sat down behind the wheel himself and demanded that Anita give him the key, so he could move our car. This is it, Anita thought. I’m being kidnapped by Al Qaeda.

But somehow, it finally became clear to the three men that our car could not be moved. They probably surmised that it was broken.

They walked back to their truck. Meanwhile, the line of cars stuck in the alleyway behind our car had grown, beginning to create a monumental traffic jam. The three fellows then began to alert all the other drivers stuck behind one another in the alleyway that they had to back up, because it was blocked. And so bit by bit, all the cars backed out, until Anita and our car were the only one left.

When I returned, there was no sign whatsoever of the traumatic experience which Anita had just suffered. Obviously, I apologized profusely. Then, I managed to find the entrance to the underground parking lot where the rental car return was located. I succeeded doing so only thanks to the directions given to me earlier by the passer-by. Signs anywhere? Nope.

When it comes to situations like this, here is what gets me: You use your GPS; you punch in your destination. If it’s a massive railroad station, or a hospital, or some other huge institution, the address you have just punched in refers to a building that takes up AN ENTIRE CITY BLOCK. When you get to the designated address and the GPS tells you that you have arrived, you have absolutely no idea what to do. The same thing happened to me years earlier, when I was looking for the address “18 Rue de Dunkerque” in Paris. I discovered that this was the address of the Gare du Nord, a railroad station the size of a football field. For such destinations, a street address is utterly meaningless.

However, regarding the Brussels South Station incident: All is well that ends well.

© Tom Kando 2019;All Rights Reserved

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