Belgian Waffle

Any attempt to frame a week in Belgium as a key component of my year of nostalgia would be disingenuous, tenuous and retroactive. The truth is I was priced out of the alternatives—the Côte d’Azur, where I’d dog-sat on a number of occasions in my twenties, and Lake Geneva, around which I’d returned repeatedly in my thirties—but had already secured some leave and was reluctant to let it go to waste.

It is also true, however, that Belgium and I do have history. While travelling around Germany and the Netherlands this winter, I skirted the Belgian border on more than one occasion and left the continent wishing I’d had time to cross it, as my family had regularly done while living at Brüggen. Any dalliance would have felt indulgent, however, and I opted instead to spend the time more meaningfully in neighbouring North Rhine-Westphalia and Limburg, regions I knew much more intimately.

While Liege—at the time our nearest major Belgian city, in Wallonia—had become a bit of a family joke and never inspired a second visit, there had been several other noteworthy trips to towns and cities across the country, namely to Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges. We also for a time had family friends living in Brussels, though I hadn’t accompanied my parents when they reconnected in the capital. Instead, I’d travelled with school friends to Six Flags in nearby Wavre. So maybe not that much of a reach after all.

In fact, once I’d booked my flights and overcome any initial disappointment at not revisiting France or Switzerland, I started to think about just how influential Belgium had actually been. Dundee-born, I’d been raised on Scotland’s iconic and idiosyncratic comic strips, receiving annuals for Christmas each year featuring the misadventures of Dennis & Gnasher, The Broons and Oor Wullie. By the time I moved to Germany, however, I’d outgrown Beanotown and instead started building out another comic book collection, one started by my father during his own childhood: Tintin.

In many ways, Herge’s books served as my introduction to Europe. At this point, I’d already lived in Australia and visited Denmark, Hong Kong and Indonesia, so I knew the world to be bigger than Britain, but through Tintin I started to explore the continent—and countries further afield as well—in a slightly deeper and more mature way. For the most part, The Adventures of Tintin combined a more realistic artistic style with keenly researched visual references and complex narrative devices. Far from The Beano’s childish hijinks or Marvel’s simplistic superheroics, the stories dealt with real world history, politics and culture, albeit with fantastical and sometimes farcical embellishments.

And so, as I boarded my train at Charleroi, having headed into town to see another Belgian mainstay—André Franquin‘s Marsupilami—at Yernaux roundabout, Herge’s style was very much on my mind, invoked by the clean lines of the station building, the colourful statue at its door the and exaggerated silhouettes of the SNCB train conductors—their wonderfully antiquated caps a particularly characterful flourish. I don’t want to labour the point, but there is a spatial and temporal ambiguity about Belgium that belies its small size as well as its geographic and political position at the centre of Western Europe. Outside the train, I could work backwards to it through a process of elimination—too clean and uncongested to be France, too hilly and good humoured to be Holland, too suave and stylish to be Germany—using caricatures of my own.

I hadn’t been expecting much from Brussels and so had only arranged to spend my first two nights there, earmarking my only full day in the city for a frankly preposterous excursion to Paris—a city I didn’t even particularly like. But I wanted to see Père-Lachaise cemetery and, with terrible weather forecast for much of the border area, thought I might as well spend the morning and evening sitting on a bus. It would also give me an opportunity to stop in Lille, somewhere I’d never been and which I hoped might provide a more appealing counterpoint to Paris. But as I approached Brussels’ main station, bathed in unexpected sunshine, I started to have second thoughts about my plans to skip town.

I did ultimately catch that FlixBus the next morning, at 7am, and enjoyed my day very much. But as I arrived in Brussels, I resolved to approach it with an open mind and make the most of my time on the ground. I don’t know what had caused me to underestimate it. Perhaps it was every tourism website I browsed apologising for its lack of big ticket items, baffled responses from friends when they found out where I was going or—most disturbingly—an unconscious internalisation of the anti-Brussels bias bandied about by Euroskeptics during the Brexit referendum. I saw the Leave campaign for exactly what it was—English exceptionalism and political opportunism—but there’s no denying they framed the debate. The EU had its defenders and champions, but few of them extended their support to the European Commission’s headquarters.

Either way, I should’ve known better. I love global cities—whether it’s Geneva, Strasbourg or Monaco—but have often found myself defending them against accusations of sterility and superficiality. These centres of diplomacy, bureaucracy and finance are often clean, safe and civil, handsomely landscaped and well maintained. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy culture, edge and character as much as the next person, and am happy to accept a degree of chaos and overcrowding to do so, but I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world and feel most at home surrounded by embassies, university students and indeed gravestones—shared spaces, melting pots and worlds unto themselves. It’s not for nothing that I grew up on overseas military bases, high commissions and joint headquarters, and is likely part of the reason I’m so suspicious of sovereignty and isolationism.

Anyway, it’s a moot point because Brussels is so much more than the Berlaymont building. After a well-timed pilgrimage to the Brussels Comic Strip Centre to avoid a short but sharp shower, I caught part of a performance at the Jazz Weekend in the aptly named Grand-Place, appreciated the splendour of St Michael and St Gudula’s Cathedral inside and out, and explored the botanical gardens in the shadow of Schaerbeek’s skyscrapers. Even after 40,000 steps, having been on the move since 2am in new shoes that were torturing my feet, I couldn’t seem to stop exploring, or dipping into every branch of Paul that I passed for a latte macchiato and flan naturel. Nor could I resist staying out for sunset, which I watched from a sparsely populated terrace near Place du Congres.

As grand and agreeable as Brussels might be, it wasn’t what had drawn me back to Belgium. Instead, I’d chosen to base myself in Antwerp, 30 miles east and closer to Holland than to France—both geographically and linguistically. Known variously as Antwerpen and Anvers to Dutch and French speakers respectively, it’s a city that had beckoned for some time and one I had considered visiting in February on a characteristically hare-brained detour between Aachen to Eindhoven Airport. Despite living near the Dutch border for four years, my grasp of the language is decidedly limited. Written down, it can often read like misspelt English or German; but there are some confounding exceptions—slagroom for cream—and the spoken form can be much more of a struggle.

According to family albums, only one photograph remains from our holiday to Antwerp—or perhaps was ever taken—featuring my pre-teen self standing on a road bridge in heavy fog, with a sign for the city the only other discernible feature. As a family, our collective memory is equally clouded, just one Holiday Inn among many from frequent city breaks around Europe. This struck me as odd given that every image I’d seen of Antwerp in the years since suggested it to be a place that would be difficult to forget. It’s the country’s second city after all; and to some who live there is often considered the first. I can only assume that the fog never lifted.

Curiously, I never found the bridge on which that photograph was taken—the lack of a mile marker suggesting to me it was relatively close to the centre. One of the remarkable things about Antwerp is that not a single bridge spans the Scheldt, at least in sight of the riverside. With the second-busiest port in Europe and a riverbed of soft clay, city planners instead favoured tunnels to connect its banks. Not that I spent that much time looking. As with Brussels, I arrived to glorious sunshine, and not wanting to squander a surprise spring day set about taking in the sites and sights that did actually exist.

Antwerpen-Centraal is sometimes described as a railway cathedral, and it certainly feels like hallowed ground, albeit with a slightly steampunk aesthetic. Never has a city made such spectacular first impression, and as I ascended the escalator from the basement platforms to the raised train shed it got more and more astonishing. As amazing as the entrance is by train, however, it’s the foyer that is truly out of this world. I could have admired it for hours, happily watching the changing light pick out new details, if it weren’t for the blue skies beckoning me outside and the school-tripping teacher encouraging his class to photobomb everyone with a camera.

There really is nothing quite like a clear sky. As the last of the clouds evaporated overhead, I made my way down Schoenmarkt in the direction of the cathedral. I planned on visiting it later in the week, when the storms inevitably materialised and the contrasts in light diminished, but knew that it overlooked Grote Markt, my destination. The hour was still early, as I’d hoped to see the square before it filled with delivery vans and other unsightly clutter. As impressive as the square is itself, surrounded on three sides by tall townhouses and guildhalls, many with colourful beer gardens at their feet, and of course overseen by the cathedral, it’s the Stadhuis and Brabo Fountain that truly dominate.

I had seen pictures of the fountain on Instagram and had been keen to photograph it myself. Yet to be turned on for the day, I was able to examine it up close and in detail, switching between my various camera lenses as I worked to capture it from every angle I could. Unlike many water features, it foregoes a bowl and instead appears to erupt from the cobblestones below. Mounted on jagged rocks, it’s both dramatic and dynamic, telling the story of Silvius Brabo, the city’s fabled founder, as he braces to throw a giant severed hand into the river, standing atop a boat held aloft by mermaids and while being pursued by a dragon. There are whole civilisations with less compelling foundation stories.

I liked Antwerp very much, and over the next few days explored as much as I could. As mentioned, I walked along the river, stopping to admire Het Steen fortress en route to the docks, where I spent a cool and cloudy afternoon in Museum aan de Stroom, a ten-storey monolith. I kicked myself for not visiting the panorama on a nicer day, but could enjoy the exhibitions on World War II, freight and homemaking without wishing to be elsewhere and stow my camera for a few uncharacteristic hours of presence. I also spent some time in the zoo, one of the oldest in Europe, searching for a kookaburra that had either died or been relocated since the website was updated, and returned dutifully to the cathedral before it closed.

I suppose if Belgium has a tourist hotspot, it’s Bruges—and I couldn’t go all that way without taking a second look. Only a couple of years separated our family outings to Antwerp and Bruges—and in the album, only a few pages—but the differences are marked. There are more photographs for starters, taken in winter instead of summer, but also a conspicuous growth spurt on my part and the first signs of spotty puberty. Trying not to think too much about what I looked like now, twenty-five years later, I was surprised by just how familiar it all felt. I’d sometimes struggled to connect with the cities I’d revisited in Germany and Holland, but I could sense discernible echoes as I walked Bruges’ cobbled streets. I wondered if it was because we’d only visited once. Perhaps I’d known Roermond and Düsseldorf so well that I’d stopped looking, whereas Bruges had made a more lasting impression through novelty alone. Or maybe the day itself was just especially memorable.

I stayed longer than planned, eating dirty fries beside the spotless canal, climbing the belfry and taking a look around a showroom of Salvador Dali-inspired works. But I wanted to stop in Ghent on my way back to Antwerp and so left while there was still time to do it justice. Despite previously visiting as part of that same trip, Ghent had become unstuck in my mind and associated instead—somehow—with a separate holiday to Barcelona, placing it many miles away in Spain, although I think this has more to do with adolescent egocentrism than Belgium’s knack for evoking other countries. For my parents, on the other hand, Ghent had been even more memorable than Bruges, and I soon saw why—its magnificent cornucopia of cathedrals casting long shadows in the late afternoon sun. I desperately wished I’d arrived in time to look inside, and casting around for a better vantage point had to settle for an upstairs window in Burger King. I had to laugh because I’d recently made a similar mistake in Lille and found myself on the third floor of McDonalds.

But Antwerp was the reason I’d come and, as my trip came to an end, Antwerp was why I was most reluctant to leave. It’s my kind of city: pedestrian in the best sense of the word, often with pavements wider than the roads they flank; multicultural, with an Albert Heijn for every Carrefour; and well connected, with Eurostar linking it to more important cities with less impressive stations. Antwerp felt like a destination in its own right, for shoppers, drinkers and architectural enthusiasts, but pleasingly unpretentious, too. I also loved my hotel. Staying with Citybox for the first time, it was as clean, comfortable and convenient as any hotel I’ve stayed in, and more exclusive than even the best Swiss hostel. When ordering coffee, the cafe also had an endearing habit of serving spoons and sugar on a waffle instead of a napkin.

As I ate my umpteenth complimentary waffle, hoping to soak up at least one of the previous night’s Belgian beers and postponing checkout for as long as possible, I thought back to those incredulous responses when I’d said I was going to Belgium. “Why?” Well, for many reasons, it transpires. For the comic strip murals of Brussels, the mythology of Antwerp, the bustle of Bruges and the collegiate charm of Ghent, with an option to detour to Paris or Lille on a whim. You can skip the Manneken Pis—wilfully or unwittingly, it’s easily overlooked—but there’s a reason that Tintin always returned home at the end of every adventure. Belgium has plenty to offer, too.