Away with the fairytales

“Flemish people like having things nice,” said Gloria, and so it proved. I was in Belgium for the weekend, visiting her – an old friend of my father’s – in Oostende and being shown the area around, and wherever we went it was prosperous and pretty.

Like the Netherlands, it’s a land where the brick is king. Brick houses, brick bridges, bricky-like cobblestone alleys – even brick churches, which threw me for a bit, because as well as being cute they look suspiciously as if they’re made of Lego. (The traditional staircase shape for the roofs of buildings helps keep up the illusion.) It also rains a lot, which I won’t hold against it, since it’s raining a lot in Germany at the moment too.

Friday night was in Oostende, a medium-sized city located by the sea, and (I hear) not really at all to the east of Westende. Saturday was spent in Brugge, a fairytale-pretty medieval town – guildhouse, turrets, moat, cathedrals, canal-front hospital (naturally all in brick). Oddly enough, my ability to spend hours wandering through nice old streets hasn't at all worsened with practice. Appropriately, we checked in at the oldest pub in Brugge. Sausages with mustard are also traditional, it seems – anyway, they go well with cherry beer. And Saturday night I stayed in their country house, four hundred years old, multi-staircased, high-ceilinged.

Of course, having towns full of impeccably-kept-up gorgeous old buildings instead of of low-maintenance new ones costs money, and so does supporting vast numbers of breweries and confectioners and lace-makers, and so does teaching every schoolchild three foreign languages. I checked, later, and Belgium is indeed a very well-off little country. Why? Wikipedia answers that Belgium exports chemicals, auto parts, finished diamonds, and other things that sound similarly profitable. It doesn’t address the question of why such industries are so keen to install themselves in such a sweet wee place. But – “Flemish people work hard,” said Gloria – and maybe that explains it.

And, Flemish people are patriotic – towards Flanders, that is. There’s a slight constitutional crisis in Belgium at the moment that I wish I knew more about, something to do with elections, and tensions between Dutch-speaking Flanders and the French-speaking part Wallonia, and a latent separatist movement. On Sunday Gloria took me to Flanders Fields, and we went through a museum dedicated to the First World War. It was sombering. It was also fiercely pro-Flemish.

Sunday night railway inevitabilities:

• A train is overbooked.
• A train is late. (Yes, even in Germany. Even in Switzerland, I bet.)
• It’s raining.
• There’s a pair of khaki’d army guys on the way back from weekend leave.
• Your neighbour on the first train has been visiting her grandchildren over the weekend.
• Your stopover’s too short to accept your nice-looking second neighbour’s suggestion of “a drink, somewhere?”
• Your smiley third neighbour has taken the seat allocated to you.
• Your fourth neighbour is asleep.