Jailbreak - time's up!

The map of all teams' destinations - we didn't do too badly!

Looking lost in this layby and desperate to reach an actual town before our 36 hours was up, we pounced on the first car that came our way. Luckily, young Ariel and his dad offered to take us to the next town, Aachen. Like many of our drivers, Ariel asked if we were scared getting into cars with randomers, but to tell the truth the danger works both ways. We had no idea who we were getting into a car with and they had no idea who they were picking up, but at least we had the safety net of the texts to our university - the drivers had no support system.
We reached Aachen just in time to text in our final location. We were supposed to send a postcard from our destination but at 8pm there was little life in the town. We also had to take a photo of us next to a landmark. As Aachen is not firmly established on the tourist map, we had no idea what to look for, which lead to a series of photos by various statues of people we didn't know:

finally a real landmark!

We eventually gathered, from sneakily borrowing a hotel's computer, that Aachen's pride and joy was its cathedral, so we started huning for that. Not knowing the word for 'cathedral' in German was, however, a bit of a setback. Why did I learn 'my hamster is dead' in German class, but not 'where is the cathedral'?! Eventually we found it and had a little photo shoot.

As Aachen was a fairly small-looking town and we were keen to ensure we got home the next day, we decided to start hitching back that evening. A man in a hotel told us we could walk to a petrol station near the edge of town and to to hitch from there. It took a while but eventually a couple took us to an out of town service station. As we were getting out of the one car, a man in a white van asked us straight away where we were headed for, and as we said 'Brussels' he was keen to give us a lift. Although we were taken aback by his eagerness to get us in his ominous van at 10 in the evening, we had little chance to confer and were getting desperate, so hopped right in. Our driver had to stop by the cargo area of Brussels airport, which added to our suspicions and worry, but despite this he actually turned out to be one of our loveliest drivers, who shared a sad personal story with us. He'd been so keen to give us a lift as he thought Amina was Indian (as he was) and thus clearly felt an affinity with her. It turns out he was just keen for some company and to look after us as he was divorced, his children didn't talk to him and his last girlfriend had ran off with his money. He drove us right into the centre of brussels, and did offer to take us to McDonalds, but the combination of us thinking this was a bit strange and being keen to find somewhere to sleep made us decline.

A breakfast dream!

Brussels was buzzing and looked like a great place to be, but we decided that we were just keen for a bed. We saw a massive concrete high-rise hotel and thought it would be a good place to find a cheap bed. The entrance hall however, was very marbled and guilded and two dirty backpackers looked very out of place (and couldn't afford a room) so we moved on. The next hotel we found was smaller and they offered us a room for 60 euros or so. It wasn't the cheap hostel we were expecting but when he told us breakfast was included we were sold. In the end it was exactly what we needed - a shower seemed like the biggest luxury in the world, and nothing can describe the comfort of a bed after sleeping in a service station! That breakfast was quite possibly the highlight of my trip. There were breads and cheeses (we made ourselves a luch too to slip into our bags!), eggs and bacon and a range of THE most delicious pastries I've ever tried (I'm not sure how much the breakfast was enhanced by our desperate state but it was still pretty darn good!). Little did I know how much that breakfast would mean to me and help me through the trauma of making our way back...