A visit, a vacation, and vivacious vespertine vizards (part 9 of ?)

Anyway, we've chosen this particular one because there's a statue
surrounded by a prism of fluorescent lights on it, and we figure
that'd be worth seeing at night. But we'll never know, as the lights,
which had been on all day, turned off as the sun went down. We head
back to the hotel.
As we're sitting in the lobby, with it's two chairs, we make the
acquaintance of two very attractive young American women, one of whom
had actually been to Burkina the year before planting Jatropha. She
was in a village not far from my own and doing work very similar to
what I've done with Peace Corps, so in other circumstances I'm sure we
could have had a lot to talk about, but the hotel lobby was simply not
conducive to socializing, nor was it in a part of town where we could
easily go out and find a place to hang out. Oh well, she was too young
for me anyway.

DAY 4 - BUS TO BRUSSELS
And the return of alliteration...
We stop at the front desk on our way out to see about reserving a room
on our return trip, but weirdly, it costs MORE to reserve the room
while there than it would to do it online through a hostel aggregator
website. We tell them nevermind - as you can tell from yesterday's
entry, we weren't particularly enamored with the hotel; it just would
have been easier to be able to leave Pat's big bag there.
We have surprisingly good hotdogs and surprisingly bad doughnuts at
the bus station, then head out to Brussels. We mostly ignore Get Smart
along the way. Anne Hathaway is quite pretty, but so is the European
countryside, with its sparkling new windfarms next to ancient
churches.
We get there and find the Brussels metro to be extraordinarily
user-unfriendly. Hostile, even. A typical sign at an info booth: NO
TOURIST INFORMATION HERE. And for whatever reason, while all of the
pamphlets on the buses are available in 5 or 6 languages (Russian,
even!), the one on the trains is only in Dutch. After one train ride
we decide to walk. We find our hostel, which is right downtown. No
metro needed - we can finally stay out late!