Belgium.......
Brughes, Belgium, is one of those cities that everyone says you must see and we hoped that it would be close enough to the beach to be a little cooler than the torrid inland temperatures that were regularly exceeding 32 degrees C. So leaving Nuremburg heading west, we slogged across Germany, fighting the truck traffic every inch of the way.
Traffic in Belgium was not much better but we found a delightful place to stay just outside of Malmedy, site of a Nazi atrocity in WWII. Today the town is beflowered and full of tourists, but small enough to be enjoyable. Our room was in a converted farmhouse down a long narrow road and we would have stayed another night but the place was fully booked. We could understand why--it was so quiet and the room was wonderful.
As we continued west, my bright idea was that we could stay in one of the beach towns where it would be cooler and make a day trip back to Brughes. Silly me. Firstly, it was just as hot at the beach as inland. Secondly, apparently not only does everyone in Belgium head for these same beaches, but almost everyone in Germany and the Netherlands too. Yikes! I thought we had seen packed beaches but this was ridiculous. The number of northern Europeans turning their fish-belly white skins into someting resembling the color of cooked lobster was absurd. (Al has decided that Europeans must get neither lung cancer, based on their high levels of smoking, nor skin cancer. We really should investigate this in a controlled study. Maybe we North Americans are just way too cautious about these things.)
We retreated back to Brughes and found a reasonably-priced hotel just inside the outer canal ring. The center of town was only six minutes away by foot, so said the desk clerk. We have learned that at my snail's pace, we have to double or even triple these estimates, but in any event, we were pretty close.
Brughes is an odd town in my opinion. The very center of the city is lively with tourists, but it does not have the feeling of a living city. The train station is surrounded by parked bicycles, like in German cities, and I think everyone must commute elsewhere to work. (We also noted that you can take the train to the beach from Brussels. These Europeans have got this public transportation thing down really well.)
The supposed appeal of Brughes is that it has numerous canals running around the through the town and a number of pretty canal bridges. The canals were pretty rank, probably due to the hot weather, and we watched a fisherman using a new-to-us technique and wondered whether he would actually eat the fish should he catch one instead of just losing his bait. There is also a large restaurant-filled square around the cathedral and city hall where you cn get a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Unfortunately, the presence of the horses means that there were a lot of large flies. Dinner the next day was at a different square with just as many restaurants but less charm due to the fact that it is built on top of a parking garage and is much more modern but also has no flies.
Brughes was OK, but in my humble opinion not worth a special trip. unless you are able to ride a bicycle. You'd have to be really comfortable with traffic to ride in town, but bicycles were everywhere. Outside of town, there are bike paths along the canals and out to the beach. Of course everything is dead flat so none of the bikes have more than three speeds. You see all kinds of people riding bikes and I'd have tried it except for this darn knee. But except for the bikes, Brughes may be special in Belgium, but there are many other cities in Europe that are as interesting or more so. Plus those Belgian prices! At least the hotel was reasonable.
A note about language in Belgium. There is no 'Belgian' language. Somehow this tiny country has managed to designate two official languages and survive quite nicely. In the east part of the country, all the signs were in German, which I believe is not one of the official languages although I might stand to be corrected on this. As we went west, signs changed to French, which is (I think) an official language. I can read French. Then in the western part of the country, oops, everything is in Dutch (or the Belgian version of Dutch--I'm not sure of there is a difference since I know nothing about that language.) All of a sudden I couldn't read any of the signs at all. We just hoped we weren't driving in some prohibited manner! Anyway, people in the US make such a big deal about having one language and here are these Belgians making do with two or three in a country that can't be bigger than a smallish US state. I can't see how they do it and I don't advocate having multiple languages but it works for them.
Brughes, Belgium, is one of those cities that everyone says you must see and we hoped that it would be close enough to the beach to be a little cooler than the torrid inland temperatures that were regularly exceeding 32 degrees C. So leaving Nuremburg heading west, we slogged across Germany, fighting the truck traffic every inch of the way.
Traffic in Belgium was not much better but we found a delightful place to stay just outside of Malmedy, site of a Nazi atrocity in WWII. Today the town is beflowered and full of tourists, but small enough to be enjoyable. Our room was in a converted farmhouse down a long narrow road and we would have stayed another night but the place was fully booked. We could understand why--it was so quiet and the room was wonderful.
As we continued west, my bright idea was that we could stay in one of the beach towns where it would be cooler and make a day trip back to Brughes. Silly me. Firstly, it was just as hot at the beach as inland. Secondly, apparently not only does everyone in Belgium head for these same beaches, but almost everyone in Germany and the Netherlands too. Yikes! I thought we had seen packed beaches but this was ridiculous. The number of northern Europeans turning their fish-belly white skins into someting resembling the color of cooked lobster was absurd. (Al has decided that Europeans must get neither lung cancer, based on their high levels of smoking, nor skin cancer. We really should investigate this in a controlled study. Maybe we North Americans are just way too cautious about these things.)
We retreated back to Brughes and found a reasonably-priced hotel just inside the outer canal ring. The center of town was only six minutes away by foot, so said the desk clerk. We have learned that at my snail's pace, we have to double or even triple these estimates, but in any event, we were pretty close.
Brughes is an odd town in my opinion. The very center of the city is lively with tourists, but it does not have the feeling of a living city. The train station is surrounded by parked bicycles, like in German cities, and I think everyone must commute elsewhere to work. (We also noted that you can take the train to the beach from Brussels. These Europeans have got this public transportation thing down really well.)
The supposed appeal of Brughes is that it has numerous canals running around the through the town and a number of pretty canal bridges. The canals were pretty rank, probably due to the hot weather, and we watched a fisherman using a new-to-us technique and wondered whether he would actually eat the fish should he catch one instead of just losing his bait. There is also a large restaurant-filled square around the cathedral and city hall where you cn get a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Unfortunately, the presence of the horses means that there were a lot of large flies. Dinner the next day was at a different square with just as many restaurants but less charm due to the fact that it is built on top of a parking garage and is much more modern but also has no flies.
Brughes was OK, but in my humble opinion not worth a special trip. unless you are able to ride a bicycle. You'd have to be really comfortable with traffic to ride in town, but bicycles were everywhere. Outside of town, there are bike paths along the canals and out to the beach. Of course everything is dead flat so none of the bikes have more than three speeds. You see all kinds of people riding bikes and I'd have tried it except for this darn knee. But except for the bikes, Brughes may be special in Belgium, but there are many other cities in Europe that are as interesting or more so. Plus those Belgian prices! At least the hotel was reasonable.
A note about language in Belgium. There is no 'Belgian' language. Somehow this tiny country has managed to designate two official languages and survive quite nicely. In the east part of the country, all the signs were in German, which I believe is not one of the official languages although I might stand to be corrected on this. As we went west, signs changed to French, which is (I think) an official language. I can read French. Then in the western part of the country, oops, everything is in Dutch (or the Belgian version of Dutch--I'm not sure of there is a difference since I know nothing about that language.) All of a sudden I couldn't read any of the signs at all. We just hoped we weren't driving in some prohibited manner! Anyway, people in the US make such a big deal about having one language and here are these Belgians making do with two or three in a country that can't be bigger than a smallish US state. I can't see how they do it and I don't advocate having multiple languages but it works for them.
posted by Al and Linda @ 2:51 AM
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