Jenni in Bruges

Our traveling totem Barley sits on a wall in Bruges.

A few weeks ago, Bob and I realised that since Bibs was born 2 years/2 months ago, our holidays have been only to the States except for a week in Germany in 2008 and a weekend in Vienna way back in January. There are many reasons to love living in London, but one of the best is hopping a plane or train and being in Europe in a few hours or less. When we moved here, we coincided with the advent of cheap airlines that would take you any where in Europe for a few pounds (and when they wanted to fill planes, a few pence). The first few years we were here, at the turn of the century, there were at least four discount airlines — Go and Buzz are long gone, Ryanair and Easyjet hang on — competing for passengers by offering lower and lower fares. This was of course in retrospect A Very Bad Thing for many places — Prague and Vilnius were overrun with very drunk Brits attending stag party and hen party weekends – and for some people too — on school holidays very drunk teenage girls were raped and very drunk teenage boys died falling out of hotel windows on Greek islands. And we hardly need to go into the Very Bad Thing this was for airplane emissions and global warming. The cheap airlines are no longer very cheap. The post-9/11 airport security levied stiff taxes on each ticket, the rising price of jet fuel increased fares further, and now we have the endless extra charges for bags, for check-in at the airport, for paying with credit cards, and now for seat reservations too.

For a time though, the cheap airfares were A Very Good Thing for us. Nearly every month I could book a ticket and be in some wonderful city: Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Helsinki, The Hague, Oslo, Copenhagen, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Dresden, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Siena, Lucca, Brussels, Paris, Nice, Cannes, Monaco, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Munich, Cologne, and Bruges. There are lots of places I still want to see in Europe — Seville, Milan, Bergen, spring to mind — but I have now been to Bruges three times. I have not seen In Bruges yet, but I will watch it tonight because it came in the mail while we were in Bruges.

My trips to Bruges started as literary pilgrimages. I can't remember where I first heard about Dorothy Dunnett, but I bought the first volume at Waterstones in one of those buy two books/get a third one free offer that is now standard in UK bookshops. Of course you can always find two you have been dying to read, but never a third with equal passion. Dorothy Dunnett, who sadly died in 2001 right as I was buying that first volume, is a cult writer with a huge, if hidden, following. She wrote two enormous multi-volume historical fiction series with casts of thousands of characters, both fictional and real, with complicated plots that follow historical events with great accuracy. In 2002, I began the eight volume Niccolo series, and I might have flagged half way through, but by that time, I had told Megan about Dorothy, and she urged me on, as a fan and a fast reader, she finished all eight volumes of Niccolo and then devoured the six volumes of the Lymond chronicle . The heroic Niccolo begins his globe trotting career in the important textile centre of Bruges in Flanders in the Duchy of Burgundy during the 1460s to 1480s. In those pre-Columbian decades, he single-handedly invents international capitalism as he roams through Europe to adventures in Cyprus, Iceland, Africa, and Scotland. By the end of 2002, Megan had convinced me that we must see Bruges for ourselves. So we headed off in cold and raining early November when many places were closed for the public holidays All Saints Day and Armistice Day which serve as a good week to take off after the tourist season is over. But we did have a good time in a lovely cozy hotel, The Egmond which I highly recommend, but it was completely booked for the month when I tried them last week, so plan ahead. We spent a great deal of time eating candy and cross-stitching after finding a very good embroidery shop. 2002 was the end of the year for Bruges as a European Cultural Capital, so there were several special shows still on view about lace and with illuminated manuscripts. And of course we wandered the streets seeking out sites from the Niccolo books where important events happen.

This is the Jerusalem Chapel where Niccolo was married with the approval of the chapel's owner Anselm Adornes who is now entombed in the chapel under this effigy of him and his wife.

The following year, Ryanair decided to fly a route to Ostend/Bruges, so Bob, Susan, and I booked for one pence tickets -- oh the golden days of destroying the environment -- which was perfectly ridiculous, and the route was scrapped after a few months. For one thing we were in the air for about 15 minutes, not long enough to fly much higher than a kite. Second, these cheap airlines which fly to less accessible destinations use not real airports, but old commercial aviation landing strips that are in the middle of nowhere, and then require long bus rides to the actual desired place of destination. On this trip the bus ride was more than an hour to Bruges! At the very last minute, Bob had to cancel because of a work-related matter, so Susan and I carried on. Susan is not an enthusiast of tourist sites that in some way resemble Disney World and attract the same travelers — she is not a fan of Venice nor of Bruges — but we also had a good time visiting the very interesting city of Ghent and exploring the old beach resort at Ostend.

I always knew that I would need a third trip to Bruges with Bob, so when we realised the paucity of our recent travels, Bruges seemed the obvious easy and near destination. Plus, Bob has now read all of Dorothy Dunnett, being the other fast reader in the family, he has plowed through both the Niccolo and Lymond series. (As the slow reader with a Pile to Read, I have not yet read the Lymond books, but I am thinking that is a possible 2010 project.) Travel to Bruges could not be easier, we took the cheap £49 train at 6:00 in the morning on Friday. The new fast Eurostar from St Pancras, which we hadn't ever used, gets you to Brussels in 2 hours. The 9:00 (add an hour for the Continental time difference) train to Ghent/Bruges/Ostend was 5 minutes late, so we caught it, and an hour later, we were in Bruges at 10:00 in the morning. Third time in Bruges is not really recommended over all. On the plus side we had a weekend of sparkling beautiful early autumn weather, several churches I had never seen were open, and Bob has a nose for good restaurants, so we had some terrific meals.

Some of the lovely canals that run though Bruges. The center of the city is usually crowded with tourists in small groups and in large groups, but when you walk away from the center, the crowds disappear. And one of the windmills placed on the embankment where the city wall once ran.
















































A Romanesque carving over a portal in the Basilica of the Holy Blood.




On the negative side, the art museum was closed until next weekend for a rehang of the collection, so we didn't get to see those jewels of Flemish art; the quality of shops has declined to offering just tourist tat both in the embroidery shop Megan and I patronised, and in the German Christmas chain Kathe Wohlfahrt where the nice angel orchestra figures I buy for Megan have been replaced with made-in-China knock-offs. And the hotels.com offering we booked had a nice entry and a good location, but the room was up two steep flights where I was eaten by mosquitos and have now broken out in some sort of allergic rash of red bumps on my face and arms.

However, the pastoral Beguinage, a community for excess women and now a Benedictine convent, is still charming and the early Flemish kitchen in the dwelling unit open as a museum is still covetable. The Memling paintings in the eponymous museum are still stunning, especially the Ursula casket.

And as a special treat we were able to buy tickets for a Telemann concert with Gustav Leonhardt playing the harpsichord. The concert hall is new, built for the Cultural Capital year, and has a strange unattractive façade of rust coloured slats, but the interior is lovely, and looking out from within the slats makes them more appealing. Gustav Leonhardt is old, 81 years, and has been playing the harpsichord in concert for 60 years according to his biography. Bob was over the moon at the chance to hear a legend play once more.

We also spent an afternoon at the seaside in Ostend where the modern stained glass in the cathedral is a knock-out, especially on a sunny day when the blue and red glass makes patterns on the white interior walls.



















Monday, on our way back to Brussels for the Eurostar return, we stopped off in Ghent to see the magnificent van Eyck polyptych The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in St Bavo's cathedral with "the most beautiful Mary ever painted," as Bob said.


Ghent has such a lovely old town with striking buildings and a scenic river and canal through the centre.

A brass plaque on a modern shop showed us the location of the building where John Adams lived in 1814, when he was negotiating the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. That brought to mind from some deep recess in the brain, the grade school poem, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix by Robert Browning, and I wondered if the poem had to do with the Treaty, and why on earth they cared in Aix (this Aix being the German Aachen/French Aix-la-Chapelle) or even thought it was good news. A little googling and it seems there was no news, no event, Browning just wanted to write a poem to the rhythm of galloping horse hoofs.

So back home in London by 10 p.m., after an excellent four days away. I think a fourth trip to Bruges would be two or three too many, but I am looking forward to spending tonight In Bruges, cinema version.