So I’m meeting a friend in Tallinn, in a few days, and having been in Birmingham I had about a week to kill between. And this is the way I think people imagine my travel is most of the time, I just started looking for places that had both cheap flights to Tallinn and cheap flights from Birmingham. And, hey, Brussels does,¹ and I’d never been, and there’s a bunch of stuff I’d been wanting to see there, so I plugged in four days in Belgium.

My initial impulse was to see everything, spend a day in Liège and Antwerp as well, but sanity ultimately reigned. I always think “four days in a country” but it’s actually “four nights in a country” and even dividing that between only two places means one full day in each. And honestly, a day in each is fine, if you’re in full tourist mode. I could have stood two days in Bruges and three days in Brussels for a more relaxed vacation, but I’ll take what I can get.

Bruges is pretty well known as a tourist destination, even more so after Martin McDonagh’s film.² It is beautifully preserved, with an utterly charming city center and nearly every narrow alleyway opening onto a picture-perfect square or guildhall or canal. It helped that I arrived just after dark, right after the Christmas decorations had gone up for the season; everything was bathed in a beautiful glow, and the Christmas markets meant you could easily pick up some glühwein while you strolled.³

It reminded me a lot of Delft, not in a bad way. Both are small cities which wielded outsize power nearly 500 years ago, with extensive trading networks and the development of luxury industries. Political and economic rearrangements have robbed both of them of that power, but their architectural legacy has been leveraged into a thriving tourist destination. If I had to pick one I’d give the nod to Bruges, simply because it has a better collection of museums — you have to take a short train ride to Den Haag to get to the really good stuff from Delft — but I couldn’t fault a decision to spend time in either, and they’re both worth at least a weekend if you can’t spare more.

I spent an aggressive day on Tuesday doing all the touristy things one is supposed to do: climbed to the top of the historic belfry, visited the Historium,⁴ stopped for frites, did the Halve Maan brewery tour,⁵ wandered around the Memling museum, and stopped for chocolates.⁶ Then crashed for the evening. It was a lot for the day. I was sorry to leave the next morning, but I did time my trip so I passed the belfry just as the carallon started its weekly concert. It was playing Disney, of course.

After Bruges, Brussels felt like basically more of the same, scaled up and modernized, like Bruges was the EPCOT version of the capital. There’s a lot more art movements represented among the architecture,⁷ but you don’t have to wander very far in the city center to stumble into some garden or plaza lined with Renaissance-era palaces.⁸ I did a lot less than I did in Bruges: a couple self-guided walking tours, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts,⁹ a quick trip out to the Horta museum,¹⁰ and ending in a clean, modern beerhall that wouldn’t have been out-of-place for Brooklyn, if you could find a place selling half-pints of Belgian Tripels for less than $5. Which you can’t, because I’ve looked.

When I think of Renaissance Bruges, I think of merchants and guildmasters who set themselves up at a crossroads of the world and grew fat and happy taking a small cut of everything. And that’s … pretty much exactly the same as today. It’s a very cozy vision of the good life, make some money, knock off at 4, stop by the bar for some beer before heading home to read some comics. Of course, the fullest modern expression of this is the EU, where all those middlemen who once logged imports of mahogany and pearls now oversee the byzantine rules governing import duties and parliamentary procedure.

Brexiteers love to sneer at that kind of thing — faceless bureaucrats from far away countries¹¹ making unfathomable decisions — but they’re essential gears in the modern world. The world’s just a lot more complicated than it used to be; you’re going to need layers of bureaucracy to deal with it one way or another. I can understand the nationalistic impulse to have those bureaucrats be home-grown.¹² But personally, I’d rather have those decisions in the hands of middle-managers who dreamed of becoming burgemeesters than those of financiers who dreamed of becoming pirates.

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Footnotes

¹ Like an idiot, after finding the flights to Brussels I compared the costs of flying into Bruges instead. Which are identical, of course, because all the flights to Bruges land at Brussels and require you to take the train. It’s sometimes hard for Americans to adjust to the size of Europe, just as it’s sometimes hard for Americans to adjust to a functioning train system in the first place.

² In Bruges might be the best advertisement for the city possible, since it not only manages to show off how charming the city is, but aggressively punctures the cutesy storybook image. Bruges can stand a little grit to humanize the place, and there’s nothing quite like a dim-witted Irish hitman to provide it.

³ Although I’d probably recommend the hot chocolate with a shot of flavored jenever.

⁴ This deserves further explication. The Historium is a multimedia exhibit featuring video mixed with animatronics and full immersive sets — not unlike a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style ride where you walk — while you’re presented with a story that takes you through the Golden Age of Bruges. This is bonkers. And honestly, it doesn’t sound great, but it’s redeemed by a honestly engaging story, decent acting, clever stagecraft, and a sincere attempt at historical accuracy. The jokes are funny. The animated parrot is lifelike, not cartoonish, and doesn’t talk. There are no songs.

You really get an idea of what living back there might have been like, from the docks to the merchant houses to the baths. And in typically charming Belgian fashion, this Disneyesque attraction even features a glimpse of full-frontal nudity in the baths. Historical accuracy it is, then.

⁵ De Halve Maan is the last of the brewers to remain in Bruges — it’s hard to reconcile the modern needs of a brewery with the limited traffic infrastructure of a medieval town — and so ended up building a beer pipeline to connect their brewing facilities with their bottling operation on the outskirts. They crowd-sourced some of the funding; investors get a return of a beer a day.

⁶ A friend recommended The Chocolate Line, Dominique Persoone’s store, so I went. And bought waaaaay too much chocolate. Which was wrapped up as gifts, so I’m just hoping it all keeps. I’m most looking forward to the “Havana,” described as “Ganache, perfumed with a distillate of Havana leaves” and the “Deadly Delicious,” which is “Jelly of raspberry perfumed with violet flowers and light hazelnut praliné” and is moulded, delightfully, into the shape of a golden skull.

⁷ Both Art Nouveau and any number of soulless concrete buildings representing more recent architectural trends

⁸ I’ll just remind everyone that all a lot of those gorgeous buildings — at least the ones built by King Leopold II — were entirely financed by his personal slave colony in the Congo. There’s a picture on Wikipedia of a Congolese father looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter; mamings were the standard punishment for failing to meet your rubber quota.

The estimate for the death toll is between 1 and 15 million people. And, I’ll remind you, this was King Leopold’s personal colony. He owned the whole thing. But, hey, lot of great architecture in Brussels.

⁹ There’s a trio of museums housed in the same collection of buildings, and all available under the same combo-ticket. The Old Masters museum is the best, but the Fin-de-Siècle and the Magritte museums are great in their own way, and all worth seeing.

¹⁰ I never really got a handle on how Antoni Gaudí fit into Art Nouveau until I toured Victor Horta’s house. Gaudí’s doing some crazy stuff, but you can see the unmistakable influence of Horta’s brand of Art Nouveau on him, in a way that just isn’t as clear with other luminaries of the style.

¹¹ Brussels is a two-hour train trip from London

¹² Someone once described the Serbian motivation for the Bosnian war as “Why should I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?”