BOXES 216-218: Bruges, with other Belgian places.

You're looking at the houses and cloister of a beguinage--or begijnhof, if you prefer Flemish--in Bruges, Belgium. Beguines were lay nuns of centuries past: single women who found shelter in a convent-like place where they performed acts of charity. Bruges' Beguinage is now an actual convent for nuns but is open to the public. I took this photo during a visit in mid-March 2000, during our third annual campus trip to Europe. Our first two had been to Canterbury (see recent posts); for this third trip we stayed in Bruges for a week, with day trips to Antwerp, Amsterdam and Brussels, plus opportunities for more side trips in smaller groups.

I'd been to Bruges before (cf. BOXES 28-30, 196-197). and was now one of the faculty leaders of our latest campus trip, along with my Art Department colleague Dionne Alby-Landgraf and our Dean, Mark Tierno. It was a great pleasure to explore Bruges in more depth, and we were made to feel welcome by the local businesses that normally catered to tourists stopping in Bruges for just an afternoon or at most an overnighter. In these posts showing my digitized slide photos I usually like to share the pictures in the order I took them, but since I mostly took random shots of the city over the course of the week, I think I had better cluster them to give this post a bit of order.

Our hotel was just off the Market Square--here you see an actual market day:

The famous Belfry stands at one side of the square, but my next photo shows it rising behind a building facing the other most important square of Bruges, the Burg Square:

In tourist photos it's most famously pictured beyond a canal near yet another square, the Huidenvettersplain, and I certainly couldn't resist:

Canals are everywhere in Bruges, with lovely houses facing or abutting the water:

The Beguinage at the top of this post is near a lagoon called the Minnewater:

I see that I took several photos of the Poortersloge (Burgher's or Citizen's Lodge), built around 1400, which faces Jan van Eyck Square. Here you see it from a canal where a great deal of shipping went on during Bruges' medieval heyday. A statue of Van Eyck is facing it. (I took the picture from a canal boat, on a tour I'll report on later.)

Here's a closer view, still from the boat:

And from a walk on another occasion, here's an angled view looking up, with spring blossoms:

On one corner of the building is a statue of a bear, the symbol of Bruges:

Looking to the right of the Lodge one sees the ancient Toll House, the white building in the row of gabled houses:

. . . and, turning farther right to face the canal, you see the Van Eyck statue:

In other parts of town we walked past a couple of guild halls: the Gothic-windowed Wool Hall and the St Sebastian Archers' Guildhall, the darker building with the tower:

The name of the tavern next to the Archers' Hall translates as The Lost Corner, and indeed it's standing on a corner, around which you can see some of the windmills at the edge of the old city:

That Wool Hall, by the way, is now (as I've learned from a web search) a Frietmuseum. Frites--which we call French fries, though they really should be named Belgian fries--are pretty much the national food of Belgium.

A few of my photos feature friends who were on the trip. Here, with the Belfry for background, are Jan Homiston with her husband, and Linda Reiss:

One day Anne and I led some students on a walk through Antwerp. We started at the Zoo, right next to the handsome train station (see BOX 213), which has has a notable collection of animals and some original 19th-Century buildings. My photos are disappointing, but I'll show what I have. I understand why I took pictures of the flamingoes, but I have no idea why I was especially interested in the tapir or the warthogs:

I tried to get a good shot of some students with the jaguar:

As for Antwerp itself, I have only a few shots. Two show the spectacular spire of the Cathedral:

And one shows a statue of the painter Van Dyck, seeming to look up at a statue of an angel holding electric or lightning shafts. The angel is standing atop an early-20th-Century department store, though built in traditional Flemish style, so maybe it represents electric lighting.

I took no photos at all during our day-trip to Amsterdam, where we spent much of our time at the museums, but I did take quite a few the next day, when Anne and I and Jim and Jean Tobin rented a car to see parts of Belgium not easily reachable by public transportation from Bruges. Our first stop was Ooidonk Castle, southeast of Bruges on the way to Ghent. Dating from around 1600 with later additions, it's a fine example of a Belgian-style aristocratic stately home. As you'll see, the grounds were open to the public on this lovely spring morning.

Our next stop, about a half-hour's drive south, was the town of Oudenaarde, which was supposed to have a spectacular town hall. and indeed it did, completed in 1637 in a Low Countries Gothic style:

On the edge of town was the Liefmans brewery, one of literally hundreds of Belgian breweries, and a favorite of ours for its fruit beers. So we stopped for a tour and a sampling of beers in their tasting room.

Unless you're very new to these posts you'll have recognized Jean and Jim Tobin in both pics, plus Anne and me.

Our third and lengthiest stop of the day was another 40 minutes south, across the invisible border between Flanders and Wallonia--Flemish vs French-speaking Belgium. Taking country roads rather than the main highway, we noticed that rather suddenly farm signs advertising potatoes for sale changed from Flemish to French, "aardappelen" becoming "pommes de terre." Our goal was the city of Tournai, which contained an important cathedral, a very good art museum, and a chance to sample Belgian-French cuisine.

Here are a couple of views of the Cathedral:

The Art Museum was designed by the great Belgian architect Victor Horta, known for his Art-Nouveau-era buildings (we visited his house, open to the public, in 1995: BOX 195), but this museum, dated from 1928, is closer to a blend of Grecian Revival and Art Deco:

Interiors are lit by skylights:

Tournai turned out to have its own Grand-Place--not as stunning as Brussels' great square (Tournai's is a triangle rather than a tightly enclosed rectangle) but handsome all the same:

The fortress-looking church is St Quentin's; the tower standing in a corner of the square is the Tournai Belfry, dating from the 1200s.

Another day trip, this one taken by the whole campus group, was to Brussels. Anne and I had hoped to make a connection between our group and Anne's brother's restaurant in Brussels, but if I recall correctly it had closed by spring of 2000. A bunch of us did go to Chez Leon, a well-known restaurant, specializing in mussels and fries, on the "restaurant row" Rue des Bouchers. Here you see us clustered outside the restaurant and in the pedestrian street; Anne is wearing the shades in the second photo:

As when we first visited the street back in 1995 Anne and I enjoyed the inviting food displays:

Elsewhere later in the day we were struck by a display of cakes, including one shaped like a hedgehog, reminding us of the hedgehog breads we'd seen in Rye the year before:

Also at some point we looked up another building by Victor Horta, the 1893 Hotel Tassel:

Back in Bruges on one of the last days of our stay we took a canal-boat tour of the city. In the next shot you see some of our travelers in one boat as we passed in another. I recognize faculty member Diana Henke in the closest corner of the other boat, and farthest back, waving to us, is Dean Tierno.

My first photos of this tour have awkward shots of backs of heads or foreheads blocking the view:

Eventually I managed to keep the camera above people's heads:

I see that before we left Bruges I took one more shot of the daffodils in front of the Beguinage:

March 17 was the last full day of our stay in Bruges, and since there happened to be an Irish pub quite near our hotel, we went there and had excellent food and drink (the only occasion when I had a Guinness instead of a Belgian beer). We were surprised to see the staff not just dressed in green but wearing face paint, as if it were Halloween instead of St Patrick's Day--we were told that this was a custom throughout Belgium. Here is a server posing with Linda Reiss:

That's the last photo in my slide box of the trip to Bruges. I have lots of other memories, sans photography, of our Belgian stay, but you'll have to ask me about them. Back home, no doubt to use up the roll and get it developed, I took six more photos, starting with two of our grandson Sam, now 8 months old, sitting on our kitchen floor:

On one occasion we made a fancy dinner: I would say for Easter, considering the strawberries in the wine, but that holiday, I see, was late in April that year. The main course seems to be some kind of meat strudel with portobello mushrooms in cream sauce:

Another shot, apparently a different occasion, shows a different kind of pastry-wrapped food plus meat-stuffed mushrooms and a tomato-mozzarella salad. The flowers make me wonder if it was for Anne's birthday in late March.

Finally, here are two shots of our cat Stony:

My next post will take us to Arizona and then parts of Wisconsin in the summer of 2000.