I had a great time in Brussels this weekend. It’s an interesting town. It doesn’t have the beauty of Amsterdam or Paris, but it does have some interesting character. It’s a massively international town and it seems that everyone speaks at least three languages.

A couple of funny things I noticed in my couple of days. First, there are these tiny little sinks in many of the bathrooms.

It allows restrooms to be significantly smaller than normal, but damn they are inconveniently small. Second, dog clean up laws exist for a reason, but apparently not in Brussels. The streets in some places seemed to be paved in a thin layer of poo.

It is certainly not a city I would put on the top of my list of cities I recommend people visit in Europe. But it does seem like a very livable place that would be fun to live in for a while.

A friend of mine let me know about a party in Brussels this weekend (advert on the right). I’ve never been to Brussels, so I grabbed some cheap train tickets and I’m headed over there after work today. I’ve heard mixed things about Brussels, but I figured as long as I had a good excuse I might as well check it out.

This is something that I was silly not to do while I lived in Washington, DC. I had plenty of friends in NYC who would send me party invites and offer places to sleep, but I never really took advantage of the opportunity. I feel silly thinking about it now because a train there isn’t really that expensive, and it really helps to have a weekend away every now and then. So here I go!

I had a bunch of crazy ideas on how to go about attacking the inauguration events plan-wise, including staying out all night until the bars closed at 4 am and then heading straight to the mall. Instead, what actually happened is that I went back home, slept through my alarm, and didn’t make it down to the mall until 9:30 (lame-o). This time, however, I was with a small group of people, so I had to be better behaved than on Sunday. We ended up camping in front of a jumbo tron next to the Washington Monument. While we were a mile away from the actual events, you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the crowd.

History was in the making, and I got to be present for it. For this, it was worth the cold and the bottlenecks and the extremely frustrating barriers that blocked off almost all the routes around the area. Trying to leave, we ended up in a part of a crowd crammed between a row of porta-potties and a chain link fence running along Constitutional Avenue. As the crowd waited in a standstill, the adventurous started walking on top of the porta-potties. Meanwhile, those against the chainlink fence finally organized a collective surge and toppled the fence over. As far as mobs go, it was a fun one to be in. Everyone was in irrevocably high spirits because of the events, so even the frustration of the delays had a real fun light-heartedness to it.

Now that it is all over, I must admit it will be nice for DC to return from urban jungle back to my home city. But few events have afforded more opportunities for real urban and crowd adventuring, from the crazy and packed night life, to the elbow-to-elbow throngs lined as far as the eye can see, to the immediate sense of community with strangers, to being a part of history–I imagine it will be a very long time before I get to experience anything similar.

So the real beginnings of the DC urban jungle adventurings began in earnest yesterday. The free concert on the national mall attracted crowds of hundreds of thousands of people. By the time I got there, the police and army had already blocked all the entrances to the Lincoln Memorial and its reflecting pool. The overflow was getting pushed over to behind the World War II Memorial and packed well past the Washington Monument.

I was originally planning on meeting up with a few friends there, but once I got downtown it became obvious that just was not going to happen. Standing in the overflow area watching the opening of the concert on a jumbo tron screen, I got a bit restless (big surprise). So I squirmed out of the crowd and starting wandering the perimeters. When I realized that there was absolutely no way to get closer to the Lincoln, I started looking for a Plan B. Then I found it. I climbed a tree.

My tree was located on the street that runs between the World War II Memorial and the mall leading up to the Washington Monument. From my vantage point, I had a 360 panorama of the entire event. In front of me was the Lincoln Memorial, behind me, the Washington Monument. From there I just watched and interacted with the crowd, listening to the music and speeches. The sight of a seemingly endless wall of people on both sides was simply stunning.

It was a great way to experience history. As I mentioned, I love people-watching. Since my tree was located on a street, I had a constant stream of new visitors. People kept jumping up to hand me their cameras so I would take photos of the panorama for them. In my many conversations with visitors, I realized it was one of those rare moments where everyone is in a truly communitarian mood. The name of the concert, “We are One,” was dead on. The mall was packed with hundreds of thousands of blissful celebrators who were all treating each other like family. It is easy for tragedy to bring people together. I think it is even more special when celebration has the same effect.

I stayed in the tree even after the concert ended, enjoying my view of the dispersing crowd and enjoying the new company that kept waving in. I had hundreds of photographs taken of me (that’s a first) and bantered with the crowd as it walked by.

If only I could get this lucky for the actual inauguration… However, my guess is that tree-climbing will be much more clamped down on for that. Eventually, after a few hours in the tree, a policeman did finally kick me out and I re-joined the crowd, my modern-day Zacchaeus-wannabe adventure coming to an un-climactic close.

I will update the blog with more photos and videos as I get them found and loaded. Unfortunately, for all the great shots I took for other people, I only had my mobile with me. I’m waiting for some of my new friends to email me some of the good-quality shots.

The endless crowds behind me. From my mobile.

A while back I was scheming about traveling to Tristan de Cunha, the most remote inhabited place on earth. Problem is, there isn’t much of a trip to be had there. You can catch a ride to the island on the yearly mail boat, but after that there’s not a ton of options.

But in place of the most remote place, it’s possible to hit a series of remote or otherwise ridiculous places in cruising from northern Russia down to China. I’ll highlight some of the superlative places, but if you are traveling in this are of the world, you’ll find that it’s all sparsely populated and challenging to get around. Here are some of the key stops:

Start of in Khatanga, one of the northern most cities in the world. There are some more northern options out there, but Khatanga is the largest settlement of any reasonable size. Carrying on from Khatanga is a bit of a problem, however, as there don’t appear to be any roads. The easy option would be to fly to the nearest place where you can carry on with ground transportation. Or if the folks there happen to know a way to carry on overland, that of course would be the preferred option.

The next stop is Oymyakon, the world’s coldest city. And it is f-ing cold. Looks like the high today is going to be -53 F / -47 C. Check out this Sky News segment for a sample of a warm day, when it’s only -31 C. The good news is that there are roads there, so somewhere before Oymyakon you can start the overland portion of the trip.

From there you’ll have to drive through Mongolia to Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province of China. That’ll serve as your base for an expedition 200 km north to the middle of nowhere. But, it’s a notable middle of nowhere because it is the point on the planet furthest from the ocean, or the pole of inaccessibility.

Then it’s up into the Himalayas to go to the highest town in the world, Wenzhuan at 5100 meters (16,732 feet). Only problem is, I don’t know exactly where it is, simply that it’s on the road to Lhasa. It might end up to be a bit of a wild goose chase to find the place, but hey, that’s all part of the adventure.

At this point you’re trip will have racked up quite a tab, and it’s difficult to go to many places that are more remote or inhospitable than you’ve already been. Everest would be a natural stop, but since it’s not really inhabited I didn’t include it here. Auckland and Perth are options for most remote cities if you want to carry on, but at this point I’d call it a trip and head home.