Belgium by Land: Part Duo

Brussels is a huge and sprawling city, and a bit intimidating to get around. Saturday morning we decided instead to visit somewhere more charming and manageable, and made the very popular day trip to the lace-making town of Brugge. We got coffee in a brutalist concrete train station, managed to get train tickets by pointing and showing numbers of fingers and toes, and were off through some beautiful countryside to Brugge (1 hour west near the coast).

Brugge is a picture perfect almost Disneyland-clean city with an interesting history. In the Middle Ages the city was a huge producer of lace and shared control of the “global” cloth trade with its great rival Ghent. The small river leading to Brugge slowly dried up, however, isolating the city and killing off its trade dominance. This pretty much froze the city in time, making it one of the most beautifully preserved medieval cities in Europe. It was ‘discovered’ again 200 years ago when wealthy Belgians started building beautiful homes matching the ancient architecture and it’s been a premiere tourist destination for recent centuries. Apparently it does get really busy and touristy in summer, but on a (freezing!) February Saturday we had plenty of room to wander. This was good, because stopping too long would let the hypothermia set in.

We took the town in with a long walk and our usual game of trying to figure out where Nick has led us astray. We visited an interesting religious community from the thirteenth century south of the city called a Begijnhof, which had a rough circle of whitewashed houses around central green. These Beguine communities were common all over Europe, and were built to encourage widows and unmarried women to live in communities and help the poor, etc. The original residents were not nuns, (they did not take a vow and were free to return to secular life) but with the decline of the Beguine communities in the last century many are now occupied by Benedictine nuns.

Proud of our cultural/religious education, we spent the rest of the day looking at grand architecture and eating amazing fries and chocolate-covered Belgian waffles. The fries were a double bonus, since they delayed frostbite and were really tasty.

A nap on the train back into Brussels got us ready for our much-anticipated Belgian Beer crawl around the Grand-Place – “one of the most uniformly beautiful enclosed city squares in Europe” as the tour book says. The square is mostly made up of ornate guildhouses which are now really cool restaurants and pubs. We tried 4 or 5 different places, trying to sample some of the highlighted beers from our guidebook. There were tons of bitter, fruity, creamy, and alcoholy beers, many with millennium-long pedigrees. The glasses were really unique too, with one notable beer, Kwak, served in a totally impractical round-bottomed hourglass so you couldn’t set it down. It came with a wooden stand to hang it from when you wanted to set it down.

Other highlights were Leffe, Chimay, and Lambic which is made with one of the oldest beer manufacturing methods on earth, using wild yeast and aged 2-3 years in a cask. Draft Lambic is extremely rare, and we went to the one place in Brussels that had it, which was an experience in itself. We walked down this long, shady ally very much off the beaten tourist track into a small beer hall with long wooden tables and benches filling the room. You just took a bench seat where you could find it among the patrons and they brought you a big ceramic pitcher of Lambic along with some mason jars. It was great, and it was fun just people watching and drinking our (kind of cider-tasting) draft Lambic.

The next morning we rose and checked out, leaving approximately 6 hours to explore all of Brussels. We started with a walk back through the Grand-Palace in daylight and read a bit about it in our trusty Lonely Planet guide. Town Hall was pretty impressive, but the guildhouses that boarder most of the square encapsulate the Baroque ideals of exuberance and complexity. The square was rebuilt after 1695 French artillery fire leveled Brussels, and city guilds used their money and power to have their headquarters rebuilt and control the style of architecture (early urban planning). The law they created said that “non-conforming facades are to be demolished at the expense of the offender,” so I guess people were pretty careful with development. Industrialization rendered guilds obsolete soon after they dumped all this money into their houses and with all industry/commerce taking place in newer parts of the city the Grand-Palace quickly became something of a museum, preserved it in its height for modern tourists like us to visit and enjoy.

We hurried on through the Cathedral, the main park in Brussels, and finally took a tram car ride to the EU quarter where all of the governmental buildings for the European Union are located. This center of bureaucracy was about as boring as it sounds, and none of the buildings or architecture were particularly stunning. Writing the EU Quarter off as a rookie tourist mistake we crossed the city to the much-more-interesting Victor Horta Museum, which was his former house and workspace. Horta practily invented the Art Nouveau style of architecture which rejected imitative styles of his time (neoclassical) in favor of an innovative style characterized by curving sinuous lines. Horta experimented with steel and glass, and said “never use a straight line when a curve will do”. His house was really interesting and a great last stop on our Brussels blitz.

Nice work to anyone who’s read all the way down to here: pictures for a reward!