Autumnsong: Travel | Touring Belgium

This trip was a bit different from any other trip I've taken. I'm a soprano at the Jesus College chapel choir, and we went on a tour of Belgium this summer, with 4 performances over the course of a few days. It was different, different even from last year's tour in Amsterdam, in part because there was considerably less time to explore freely. Still, I managed to see some pretty cool stuff...

Days 1-4

For the first four days we stayed at the Abbaye de Maredsous, and we had two performances in the region. I expected this to be a calmer, quieter part of the trip, and indeed it was. We stayed in the monastery and took a tour of the distillery in the last day, but other than that, there wasn't much to do other than walk around, visit the farm shop, have some cheese at the gift shop, things like that... The tour of the abbey itself was very interesting, with the monks talking about how, even today, monastic life is about studyng alone, praying alone, praying in a group and receiving guests... I spent a lot of time in the cloisters reading and writing.

Day 5

On the fifth day I had a day off, so I went to Brussels to walk around the capital and - the thing I was looking forward to the most - go to a Belle and Sebastian concert that evening.

The tour started at the parc du cinquantenairemont, from which I walked down to the buildings of the European Parliament. They weren't open for visitation, but I wanted to have a look at the place, and it was on the way down to the city centre. From there I walked by the royal palace, to the spetacular views of the mont des arts.

The cinquantenaire arch. There was a little board game fair at the park while I was there, but sadly there wasn't mush time to stop and try a new game.

The European Parliament. The writing on the wall features all of the languages in the European Union.

The Royal Palace.

Mont des arts

The carillon next to the Mont des arts. I got to listen to it as it rang, it was a special little moment.

I included the manneken pis on my tour, which was dressed in a weird blue fluffy onesie... I didn't get to learn why that particular outfit, but apparently, nowadays the little statue is dressed for about half the year

Manneken Pis

I finished my tour at Grand Place/Grote Markt, a beautiful square in the city centre surrounded by guildhalls, the Flamboyant town hall and the Bread house, which houses the city museum. From there there was still time to have a look at the city cathedral (Cathédrale Saints-Michel-et-Gudule). The church was beautiful, and immediately after I entered I noticed the statues of the apostles, in each of the columns that supported the main vault. The pulpit, with carvings depicting the expulsion from paradise was also very beautiful. Near the altar, at the other end of the church there was a relic of St. John Paul II, which I found kind of cool.

Brussel's town hall


The Bread House

Another corner...

Façade of the cathedral

Expulsion from paradise

All the while I was walking by these landmarks, I stumbled upon some pretty cool places around Brussels, which is really the best part of this kind of wandering self-guided exploration...

Scary Tin-Tin at a bookshop window

I spent some time here, looking through the book boxes outside the shop, trying not to go crazy buying new books :)

The city, talking to me

A record store

Look at this charming little corner cinema... I have a fondness for cinemas, they are always a refuge for me when I am having a hard time...

The city speaking to me again...

I really liked the sign, but the cinema itself seemed abandoned, sadly...

Finally, it was time to stand in line for the gig. This was the best gig I have ever been to, but it deserves a post of its on. All I'm going to say now is this: it was amazing.

The line for the Belle and Sebastian gig outside the Ancienne Belgique

Day 6

On Day 6 we had a performance at the Flemish Coastal city of Ostend. Being near the ocean for the first time in months, I wanted nothing more than to spend some time at the beach, enjoying the sea, and that's exactly what I did. I found a nice spot, watched the waves, walked up and down the coast line, had some nice food, and relaxed for a whole day.

Ostend. This is the only picture I took before my batteries ran out, but that was okay... The day wasn't about photographs at all...

Day 7

On the final day, I had a few hours to explore Bruges, location of our final performance. I took a boat tour of the town (on a much smaller boat than the one in Berlin a few weeks ago), which was very informative. A particular highlight was getting to see the house where Audrey Hepburn lived when she was in Bruges. Then I went to a couple of bookshops, looking for my traditional copy of Harry Potter in the local language. As Bruges is in the flemish part of Belgium, it would have been nice to get a copy in Flemish, but as it turns out there isn't one, so I had to settle for the Dutch version of the deathly hallows.

Audrey Hepburn's house, view from the canal

The tower of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Lady), the tallest structure in Bruges. I stopped down later, to see the Michelangelo Madonna they house in there, but the exhibition was a bit of a let down. The Madonna was stolen already (or there were a couple of attempts at stealing it), so you can only see it from many meters away, and the statue wasn't made to be appreciated from such a distance, which is unfortunate.

There was much in Bruges that I would have liked to see, the museums in particular, and the art of Van Eyck, but there wasn't much time with our schedule of rehearsals and performances. Furthermore, on the only day I had to look around, all of the major museums were closed. But I got to visit a really cool place: the torture museum. This was especially cool to me because, growing up, I had an "inquisition phase", during which I was trying to learn everything I could about the holy inquisition. I still remember the word document I compiled with information collated from multiple websites. And at Bruges, I got to see many of the torture devices I had only ever read about. What is more, most of the items in display were originals, not replicas, which made the museum that much more interesting.

This is the famous iron chair

Isn't this cage simmilar to the one Madmartigan was locked in, in Willow?

The breast ripped. It does exactly what it sounds like.

In addition to information about torture devices, the museum also had some info about tools of humiliation. This barrel for instance was a common punishment for drunkards in some parts of the world.

An original Judas' craddle. One of the most impressive items on display at the museum. By the ways, the walls in the back are the original walls of a prison that used to be located at the site of the museum (in the heart of the city centre). The exhibition is underground.

An original iron maiden.

After the museum I had lunch at the main square (Bruges Markt) and visited the historium, which was kind of like a precursor to a holoprogram in a way. This museum supposedly provides you with an experience of what Bruges was like during the time when Jan Van Eyck lived here, but what it actually is is a movie. The only thing is that instead of watching the movie in a theatre, you move through a house, watching different scenes in different rooms, the rooms in which those scenes take place. That way, instead of just visual and auditory clues there's also an olfactory element to the experience, a sense of actually being in the room when those things happened. The story was about an apprentice of Van Eyck who lost an expensive bird his master required. It was super cool.

View of the Belfry, from my lunch table across the Markt

Provinciaal Hof, where the Historium is. This is also where the Waterhalle used to be, the central port of Bruges. Kind of unbelievable, but even now, the river runs beneath the building.


Inside the historium. We see the scene unfold in the other room. Notice Van Eyck at the back, talking to the main character of the story.

While the story unfold we climb up the building, and after the end, you get out at the balconies of the Provinciaal Hof, to a beautiful view of the Markt.