Brugges

(I am back in the US for short time now, this post is retroactive)

I made an unscheduled trip to Bruges last night. One of my coworkers who visited China last week brought two employees from that location to BTC. The visitors had grown tired of Western food, and so Jan told them he’d take them to a well known Chinese restaurant in Bruges, and invited me along. He lives in the direction of that city, and the four of us headed to pick his wife up on the way. (Note: Ghent is not the “Venice of the North” as I said earlier, Bruges actually is, despite the fact Ghent has far more canals.)

That part of the trip was educational in and of itself. Despite being on the way to Bruges, Jan lives far out in the country, and we used rural roads to get there. For a region renown for being flat as a pancake, the roads here sure are curvy in some places, and this particular route was hardly ever straight, and had about twenty roundabouts in it. I think we were on “Sillystrawstraat”. Judi, add Bonine to your pre-move shopping list.

To make things more interesting, I learned for the first time (both by having it explained to me, and empirically first hand) that there are more pigs in Belgium than people (of which there are ten million). Now apparently this particular area of Flanders is quite heavy with the pig production, and it made me glad we are only cow heavy in the Valley because even a few dozen pigs per field made the entire area smell quite- agrarian. We arrived in what was probably the porcine capital of the Universe to pick up his wife at a ceramics furnace (adjacent to a corn field), who loaded her art pieces into the trunk of the car and filled the last bit of space in the back seat. The day was actually quite hot, and the car very stuffy, and the air very musty, so when we set back upon Rue de Sillystraw the Chinese people and myself began to turn green.

We drove for something like half an hour to “see the country”, before we arrived in another town to drop the art pieces off at a studio. Jan and his wife got out of the car, and took the articles in the trunk into the building. The three of us in the car just sort of tried not to breathe too much, and sat in the uncomfortable stew that the car had become. After a few minutes, Jan came back out and said “my wife wants to know if you’d like to come in and take a look at the amateur art”. Ever heard of a Chinese fire drill?

The art show was pretty neat, and most of the work was actually quite good. In the amateur class they covered several different media, including sculpture, drawing, and painting. From there we got back in the car, and drove out of the country into Bruges. Getting back in the car wasn’t so bad, as the pig smell had dissipated and we had cooled off. On the highway it only takes about twenty minutes to get to Bruges, but I was happy to have seen the scenic route despite olfactory concerns.

Bruges is very nice, and is considered the most scenic city in Belgium. Indeed it is, partly because the many Belgian wars passed the city over leaving it almost untouched, and also because the local government seems to have invested significantly in the image of the city. It does have all of the trappings of a “tourist spot”, the most common criticism of the locale, but it isn’t anything one wouldn’t see in such a place anywhere else (hyper programmed zoning, souvenir shops, overly-“Belgian” merchandise). Still, there are many nice looking restaurants in the city, and it continues to maintain its moat and a few canals which are all buffered by huge trees and green space. The waterways are full of swans and other fowl, and as one might expect boat rides are available to see the scenic parks and historic buildings that abut the waterways. There is a major beginnery there, and a historic seminary for training Catholic priests that is still in operation, pulling in students from all over the world.