South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Bruges and Ghent are forever linked, though they sit 35 miles apart on the Flemish plain, in the northern, Dutch-speaking half of Belgium. For starters, they both enjoy various spellings. (Brugge and Gent in the native tongue, each word sending the speaker into a mild guttural fit). They are about the same age — give or take a couple of hundred years — and they share a heyday — the Middle Ages, when they were two of Europe’s greatest textile producers and centers of commerce. They both suffered dramatic declines, though only Bruges’ was immortalized in a novel, Georges Rodenbach’s “Bruges La Morte” (later turned into the opera “Die tote Stadt” — The Dead City). And they both provided props for Jacques Brel’s stirring, bilingual love song. Now, especially in summer, they are both basted with tourists (though Ghent a little less so) who clog their medieval streets, stroll their waterways, admire their masterpieces (Jan van Eyck’s “Madonna and Child with Canon van der Paele” being Bruges’ answer to his “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent”), and photograph their stepped gables which press against the oft-fallen sky like great warm rows of almond cookies. (“With a sky so low,” Brel sang of his native land, “that a canal disappears/With a sky so low it makes for humility.”) As sisters, Bruges is the belle while Ghent — no heifer herself — is the bohemian. At least that is the popular perception. There is a renowned university in Ghent — the first in Belgium to conduct classes in Flemish (in 1930) — which gives the city an intellectual air, artistic credentials, a reputation for tolerance. Students come from all over Flanders, a generally conservative region, and find, in the narrow streets, a wider world. Many of them stay after completing their studies. But a progressive Flemish city is still a Flemish city. “There used to be three collections in church,” an immigrant Catholic woman told me. “The third was for new chairs — two euros. If you gave more they would give you change back.” Not many young people attend church, she added; most children are baptized, but few go on to their first communion. On Sunday the citizens of Ghent go to the flower market near the Royal Opera to buy bouquets to take to the family dinner. At one corner of the market square, red wine and oysters are sold from a small booth where a good percentage of the customers are artists and intellectuals. Just off the square sits the Cafe Theatre, an elegant restaurant whose “global cuisine” is made available, every Christmas Eve, to the homeless, who are invited in and allowed to order anything from the menu that they desire. In the modernistic men’s room there is no washbasin; you step on a pedal to unleash a flow of water that cascades down a waist-high, softly lighted cone. You wonder how the homeless handle that. At another square, Vrijdagmarkt (Friday Market), the streetlamps are connected to the maternity hospital and blink off and on whenever a baby is born. “The work,” explains a plaque in the pavement, “is dedicated to the newborn child and to all the children today in this city.” Facing this square is the Academie de la Biere (Beer Academy) where anyone ordering a glass of Kwak has to remove his shoes and watch as the waiter ties them to a rope and hoists them to the ceiling. Kwak is served in a glass with a rounded bottom and a long narrow stem that necessitates a wooden holder; the apparatus, resembling something from a biology lab, was what coachmen attached to their carriages to hold their beer. So many patrons stole the glasses that the academy decided to take their footwear hostage while they drank. Up a side street sits the Mosquito Coast Travel and Adventure Cafe. People say that the missing panel from van Eyck’s masterpiece, now on display with a reproduction panel in Sint Baafskathedraal, is probably still in the surrounding countryside, hidden in some farmer’s house. |
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About 15 years ago, the director of the contemporary art museum (SMAK) invited 50 artists to the city and gave them free reign. One put stuffed cows on little islands of grass and floated them down the River Leie. One had the hourly bell tolls replaced by the famous cry of Tarzan. One made a recording that filled the ground floor of a house with the impassioned dialogue of a domestic quarrel, followed by the sound of plates flying out of the window and crashing onto the street. “No,” a resident insisted, “real plates flew out the window.” At the wine bar De Tap en de Tepel, a sticker outside proclaims: “Foie gras is the sick liver of a tortured animal.” “The owner,” a young filmmaker told me, “hates rich people. But he has very high-priced wines, so it’s rich people who go there. He lives off the people who he says he hates.” On greeting, the people of Ghent kiss a friend once, as a sign of affection; they kiss a new acquaintance three times, out of politeness. There is a Turkish community, offering inexpensive restaurants with delicious Turkish pizzas. In July, the city celebrates Gentse Feesten, a 10-day bacchanal. “It’s crazy,” an illustrator of children’s books told me. “Everyone who lives in Ghent gets out. When I was doing my military service I left my house one morning and found two people making love on top of my car. And I had to interrupt them because I needed to get going.” Before leaving the city I bought an ice cream cone and told the scooper my profession. “That,” the young woman said with dreamy eyes, “is a job that speaks to the imagination.” But then Bruges the belle is not all looks. Across the plains, past the charmless red brick farmhouses and the lovable Belgian draft horses, you come upon another steepled Oz. You drag your bag across the cobblestones, under green and maroon awnings, past the Grillhuisje and the Sandwicherie advertising (more traditionally) Belegde Broodjes, alongside the Chocolate Corner (little brown regiments of rounded truffles) and the Tapestry Lace Shop until you halt at a comic book store and find your way blocked by a Japanese tour group. Every city has two sides, light and dark, but Bruges is an almost totally different place by night. After dusk the tour buses leave, the streets empty, the decibels fall, the city is reclaimed. It is like a tide gone out. The waffle irons cool; the shop window chocolates bed down for the night. The stone towers, now illuminated, pierce the starry sky like rockets on their medieval pads. Inside the Cafe Craenenburg, on the Market Square, the regulars sit in their straight-backed chairs under six-bulb chandeliers while waiters move among them in white shirts and black aprons. (You have located the place thanks to the “Special Beer Tour” map given to you at the city tourist office.) Up St.-Jacobsstraat, at De Republiek, students drink in the chilly courtyard. And in the B-Cafe on Wollestraat you sit at the neon bar next to a young woman with spiked black hair and a “Rice People” T-shirt who tells you that the citizens of Ghent who call Bruges “a museum city” are a bit narrow-minded in their thinking about their urban sibling. Then she buys you a beer. A small group huddles at L’Estaminet, the dim cafe facing Koningin Astrid Park. The night people. They sip beer, smoke cigarettes, discuss books, oblivious to the hour. The bar closes, you learn, whenever the customers leave, not when the owner is ready for bed. In the morning it’s tourist central again, but leaving the crowds you find peace at the Begijnhof, a compound of small white houses, with black-trimmed windows and doors, clustered around a leafy yard. The lay sisters have been replaced by Benedictine nuns, and are usually outnumbered by tourists, but the latter hardly make a dent in the pocket tranquility. Last year was Bruges’ turn (along with Salamanca, Spain) as European City of Culture, a designation coming with a swell of cultural events that make every city more electric, more outre, than usual. One night, an old warehouse along the river became a theater, with spectators sitting at tilted tables around a stage set up like a kitchen. Two actors appeared — red aprons tied around gray pinstriped suits — and played soft notes with large spoons tapped against bottles filled to various levels. Gradually, they were joined by other actor/musician/cooks, members of the Laika Theater Company. Cabbages were cut, with rhythmic flare, and to musical accompaniment; meat was sliced, while a saxophone growled. A great waterfall of peas was released from an overhead chute, little errant green balls rolling all over the stage. As the kitchen work intensified, so did the music. It was a beguiling spectacle, blurring the lines between the theatrical and culinary arts, demonstrating the similarities between making music and food. (For aren’t phrases like “heating things up,” “now he’s cooking,” applied to jazzmen?) The title of the piece was “Patatboem,” a play on the phrase “Ba-da-boom” using the word for potato. Dinner theater. IF YOU GO: GHENT AND BRUGESGETTING THERE: There are trains throughout the day from Brussels — about 40 minutes to Ghent and about 10 more to Bruges.LODGING: In Ghent, I stayed at the Hotel Erasmus, which occupies a 16th century house on a quiet street a few minutes walk from the heart of town. Rooms start at about $75 a night. (Hotel Erasmus, Poel 25, 9000 Gent, Belgium; phone 011-32-92-24-21-95; www.hotels-belgium.com/gent/erasmus-gent.htm.) In Bruges, I also stayed at the Hotel Erasmus (Erasmus is not a chain, just one very popular Renaissance theologian). This one overlooked a canal and was a one-minute walk from the Market Square. While the hotel in Ghent had a kind of austere refinement (I dropped in one afternoon and caught the owner playing the organ), this one had a homey charm, with a lively little restaurant on the first floor and an outdoor terrace. Rooms start about $65 a night. (Hotel Erasmus, Wollestraat 35, 8000 Brugge, Belgium; phone 011-32-50-33-57-81; www.hotelerasmus.com.) A more expensive option in Bruges is the cozily elegantly Hotel Die Swaene, situated near the center but tucked away on a peaceful canal. Rates start about $150. (Hotel Die Swaene, 1 Steenhouwersdijk, Brugge B-8000, Belgium; phone 011-32-50-34-27-98; www.dieswaene-hotel.com.) EATING: The bad news: If you go in the summer, mussels will be hard to find. (Like oysters here, they’re usually served in months ending with “r”.) The good news: If you go in May or June, white asparagus will be in season. I found a restaurant in Bruges that offered an “asparagus menu” — cream of asparagus soup followed by asparagus draped with thin slices of ham in a bechamel sauce. Delicious. French fries, a Belgian specialty (despite their American name), are sold on the street, served in paper cones with a dollop of mayonnaise (plain or in a daunting variety of flavors, including curry). If you get tired of continental cuisine, try one of the Turkish restaurants. DRINKING: Beer is another joy: I have been to other famous sudsy realms — Germany, the Czech Republic, Oregon — and none of them can compete with Belgium, partly because the Belgians experiment with all kinds of flavors, including fruits such as peach and cherry. And then there are the Trappist monks with centuries of experience. I had a different beer every day — at which rate I would have had to stay for over a year to try them all — and was never disappointed. Some favorites were Chimay Bleu, Kwak, Bruges Triple and Oerbier, which, even when delicately poured by my waitress, erupted and, for several minutes, overflowed my glass like some chemistry experiment gone marvelously wrong. INFORMATION: Contact the Belgian Tourist Office, 780 Third Ave., Suite 1501, New York, NY; 10017; phone 212-758-8130; www.visitbelgium.com. |
