Bruges, Belgium

Classic view of Bruges, Belgium

For reasons unknown to me, Belgium gets a bad rep, mostly from the Brits. There seems to be a running joke that Belgium is boring and useless, which is difficult to understand for any tourists who visit this small European treasure!  The Fairytale Town of Bruges is most certainly the nation’s crown jewel. It has everything a traveller would want: Belgian waffles and fries sold every 10 steps (though not together!), oh-so-much chocolate, beautiful buildings, old Gothic-style halls and belfries, canals, cobblestones, fantastic beer, not-s0-terrible prices (in comparison to its neighbours, the UK and France!), and cheap, easy connections to other Belgian cities such as Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. If you’ve seen In Bruges, you’ll see the foreigners’ “dislike” of Belgium in general and Bruges in particular, but at the same time, the boss (minus the swearing) hits the nail on the head while bewilderingly responding to his employee’s response that “Bruges isn’t his ‘thing’: “It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it? How can a fairytale town not be somebody’s thing? How can all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets and those churches, all that beautiful fairytale stuff, how can that not be somebody’s thing, eh? How can swans not be somebody’s thing, eh? How can that be??!” How indeed?