Charming Bruges and Ghent
- Aug 26, 2016
- 2 min read
Well, I can’t say this was unexpected. As the old quote goes, “what goes up must come down,” or, in my case, “who goes to Europe must eventually leave it.” Yes, yesterday, August 22nd, I returned to Canada after exactly 367 days in Europe. During this time I visited 18 countries and over 50 cities, all the while spending quality time in Madrid and living like a local.
It was, by far, the best, most fulfilling year of my life, but more on that later. This blog post is not a reflection on the year, that will come in a future post, here I simply want to tell you about my last week of traveling, and about the two new countries that I had the pleasure of discovering.
After spending the night at the airport in Rome after leaving Italy, I landed in Brussels but took a train directly to Bruges. It’s funny, Belgium is so small (though bigger than Slovenia) that Bruges, another city entirely, is just over an hour away from the capital, Brussels, which is smack in the center of the country. Hell, in Montreal Bruges could even be a suburb of Montreal and you’d find people commuting in from there every morning. But no, not in Belgium, their population of nearly 11 million people is crammed into a space a lot smaller than Canada, so there is actually a life and jobs in Bruges. It’s interesting, observing how life unfolds in these smaller countries.
So Bruges. I was first inspired to go to Bruges when I watched a movie, ‘In Bruges,’ about a year earlier. The movie was alright, but it was entirely filmed in Bruges and the city was even referred to in the film as a ‘fairy tale city,’ so, naturally, I was in Belgium, I would be forever regretful to not have gone check it out. So I did.
A fairy tale, perhaps not, but this city was overrun with tourists, and for a reason! First off, the two main squares were simply stunning!
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And the rest of the city was not too shabby either.
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I particularly loved the architecture, which resembled the typical Dutch architecture, and it kind of makes sense, even though I was in Belgium I was in the Flemish part of the country, and everyone was speaking Dutch and not a word of French. The typical architecture is essentially the ‘staircase-style’ roofs on the houses, anyways it was really interesting.
Bruges didn’t take too long to visit, and that day I had already booked a hostel in Ghent, so off to Ghent I went. Ghent is in between Bruges and Brussels, about half an hour from both, and is smaller than Bruges with a more compact historic center, but very pretty nonetheless!
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The Ducth-style architecture here was a lot less pronounced, kind of like a middle-ground between Dutch and French architecture, but it was also a really cute city and well worth a visit.
Off to Brussels.
-Daniele
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