my friend and i left our 2 backpacks in the overhead cabin on the train from brussels to bruge. a man sat down right behind us as we were arguing, then left before the train moved. i thought to myself what a weird passenger. as the train departed, we realized our backpacks were gone, including all of our clothes, 2 macbooks and my friend's passport. we booked the return train immediately back to brussels, went straight to police station to file a report. the bureaucratic belgian police couldnt do anything because it took 3 days to be granted permission to extract cctv footage. we still have the live location of our belongings on find my, yet police had no warranty to break in. so we decided to take matters into our own hands and followed the location. it led us to the sketchiest corner of the arabic neighborhood of belgium, to this run down hostel with the trains running above their heads, where every man eyed us up and down.
so we gave up, booked the cheapest hostel in brussels to stay overnight, and got bed bugs from there. we both got new macbooks in school, and my friend got an emergency passport in paris and we continued to travel for 6 more countries on that passport.