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Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

Belgium gave me one of the more annoying train experiences when I was a younger man. I was in Leuven for a conference, and had decided to bring my then girlfriend (now wife) for a trip, after which we would take the Eurostar to London. On the ticket, it said Brussels-Midi, but after happily boarding the train, we only saw the following related options on the train map for stops:

1. Brussel-Noord

2. Brussel-Centraal

3. Brussel-Zuid

So here we were, not speaking the language, rushing for a train that we were at risk of being late for, and not having a clear idea of the actual stop to get off of.

And the people on the train? Totally unhelpful. "Eurostar"? Shrug. "Train to London?" Blank looks.

Anyway we winged it and made it, but still a damn stupid set up if you want to be welcoming to tourists (and their money).

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Brussels in particular perhaps is sort of non-intuitive because, even (or perhaps especially) if you know a little bit of French, the station names don't obviously correlate to their relative locations. There is a logic but it's not obvious to someone not used to it--and, honestly, I'd have to go online to figure it out again.

Was it Centraal? That would have been my guess.

Nope, the biggest station is actually Midi/Zuid.

Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.

In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.

Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.

This is indeed the bizarre convo I was having with myself, having (allegedly) taken some French classes, I was racking my brain on which was the correct answer. We always used "sud", and Midi didn't seem to be south, eliminating Zuid (Since Zuid/Sud seemed similar), and yes Midi seems "mid-day", so maybe "Central" since it's the center of the day, but then there's "Centraal", so why would there be Centraal and "Brussels Middle"?!

So we winged it and got off at Zuid (since Noord felt wrong and Centraal definitely seemed wrong) and luckily it was the right one.

We did have a wonderful evening (perhaps too much so) the night before at a nice craft beer bar in Leuven which had 100 beers on tap, and it had just bought over by a nice young couple as well. So perhaps neither of us were in the right state that morning to navigate a confusing train map! Good memories.

Southern France is also called le Midi!

BTW, Ukrainian shares the same logic, but it also calls the north "midnight" (північ). Meanwhile, Armenian calls the east and west "sun exit" and "sun entrance" (արևելք, արևմուտք) respectively.

In Europe (and anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is always approximately due south at noon. That’s the reason for the connection, and “midi” indeed means both south (in some contexts) and noon in French.

Makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!

I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.

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