Brugge, Ghent, Brussels

 Brugge, Ghent


This was supposed to be a photo-filled report on my side trip to Western Belgium, but, as related in my next post, a pickpocket now has my (useless = broken + double password protected) phone including all my photos.

I confess I didn’t like any of the pictures. Brugge is the ultimate tourist city, carefully preserved 14th century buildings of brick, all picturesque (sort of pun intended), all clean and tidy, all suitable for photography. What is lacking is any real city life. It’s a bit like The Truman Show, you half expect to bump into the fake sunset if you stray away from the other tourists. There is a small town square with some vendors that I liked, but there wasn’t much else to comment on.

Ghent (spelled Gent hereabouts) is a bit livelier, more like an actual cosmopolis. There were local folks kayaking on the river that runs through the center of the town and there did seem to be some sort of commerce happening. Like Brugge most of the structures date from the 15th and 16th centuries. 

The one impressive aspect of both places are the tall towers that dominate the towns. All of them (several in Brugge, one in Ghent) were constructed in the golden age of Belgium circa 1500 or so. How they managed to put up such massive structures in those times baffles me. They look to be about the size of a 10 story skyscraper. I guess photos would help here, but, of course, I have none until I return to the USA and get back to my home phone). 


Brussels, to its credit, is probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world in the sense that the population is an amalgam of people from all over the world. They are over 40% foreign born. {I looked it up; NYC is 23% foreign born.} That allows people to skip the rabid nationalism that infects most of the world. People seem happy to live in such a city but they don’t correspondingly disdain their neighbors. 

On the negative side their laissez faire attitude means there are few restrictions on smoking, and most of the population participates in that foul practice. 

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