A night in "Cologne", a ride to Bruges

by Diane

Or, more properly, “Brugge.” This is a Vlaamse-speaking area: while you can speak French here, it’s probably politer to default to Flemish. (English is always accepted, almost gratefully, as an alternative. A word, also, to the wise: this would probably not be an area where German is terribly popular as a linguistic alternative. Having previously spent some days in Switzerland on an earlier trip, I picked up a menu and out of habit, said, “Bitte…” Things went on in German for about a minute and a half until “mein Deutsch”, such as it is (“sehr kaum”!) failed me. I fell back into English, and the manageress of the restaurant breathed a big sigh and said, “Oh, thank you…” and continued the discussion in English which was better than that of some native English-speakers I know. …It is worth remembering, in circumstances like this, the monument at the North Gate of the city; it commemorates, most affectionately, the Canadians who liberated Brugge in 1945.

…This is another of those “timewarp” cities. In Basel, in the middle of the night, you can suspect yourself of having fallen into the 14th or 15th century: here you can do it in broad daylight.

Brugge was one of the richest cities in this part of the world, in the 1400’s and 1500’s, due to its adroit management of its end of the wool trade with England. (The city imported rough fleeces and exported them as finished cloth, or sometimes — more unusually — as spun thread.) The great families of Brugge became wealthy enough to do things like (in one family’s case) build their own “corporate box” into the great cathedral of the city — high up above and to the left of the high altar, so they could (through a bay window) attend Mass in their bathrobes — and they had enough spare florins flying around to commission that hot young Italian artist, Michaelangelo, to do a Madonna and Child for the cathedral: the first Michaelangelo north of the Alps.

The boom lasted a long while, but eventually came a bust, affected as much by their harbor at Zeebrugge silting up as by anything else. The city fell on hard times and became such a backwater that neither side bothered to bomb it during the war. The place was poor for a long while, and only began to recover during the 70’s.

But then Brugge found that History had dealt it the same kind of weird backhanded favor it did when it made Ireland too poor to put chemical fertilizers on its fields and pastures (for which reason its grass-fed beef is now famous all over Europe, and its organic produce is becoming that way). Brugge had been ignored… and hence all the great old buildings of its medieval inner city had been perfectly preserved. The city began renovating itself and (in a very smart move) putting all its utilities underground. Phone, electric, cable, fiber, everything went under the paving stones. Satellite dishes are not permitted to be visible on the outsides of buildings: everybody in town has affordable thousand-channel cable and broadband, and if you want something more exotic, as long as you can hide the hardware from the tourists, you’re fine. As a result, you can walk through the Markt and all the streets around it and see nothing that reminds you of this century…except the things inside the shop windows. A big problem, there, for this is one of the great shopping towns of northern Europe.

Fortunately I have other things to do while I’m here. My base is one of a number of beautiful “holiday apartments” rented by a smart and energetic couple whose own house, a 14th/16th century building two minutes’ walk away from the Great Market, is next door. The apartment is spacious, has a fully equipped kitchen, and everything else a working writer could need, including WiFi. It does *not* have four cats, endless mailmen, delivery guys, and constantly ringing phones. Which is why I’m here, and will be until the 30th, kicking various wizards around.

I’ll post pictures later. Right now: to work…

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