Day 70: Today's Pick — In Bruges (the City, Not the Movie)

Bruges should not exist.

I mean this technically. The city, in northern Belgium, was a global trading powerhouse in the 14th century — a port for the Hanseatic League, a banking center, a place where wool from England turned into money on its way to Italy. Then, late in the 1400s, the river silted up. The boats stopped coming. The merchants moved on, mostly to Antwerp. And for the next four hundred years, Bruges did almost nothing. It quietly stayed in the 1400s while the rest of Europe modernized around it. The buildings did not get torn down because nobody had any money. The plumbing did not get updated because the plumbing was fine. By the time the 19th century discovered tourism, Bruges had accidentally become a perfectly preserved medieval city, and it has been gently capitalizing on that fact ever since.

You should go. Here's how.

Bruges is small. The historic center fits inside a roughly oval ring of canals about a mile and a half across at its widest. You can walk the whole thing in a morning. You should not. Walking the whole thing in a morning is a tourist mistake. The right thing to do is walk a small piece of it slowly, sit down in a square, eat a thing, walk another small piece slowly, repeat. Bruges rewards meandering more than any city I have visited.

What to do, in rough priority order:

Eat the frites. There are two takeaway frites stands on the main square, the Markt, that have been there since approximately the invention of potatoes. The one to go to is whichever has the longer line. Order them with mayonnaise, andalouse sauce, or the local samurai sauce. Eat them standing up, watching the bell tower.

Go to the Groeninge Museum. It is a small Flemish primitive art museum and it has, in one room, three Memlings and a Van Eyck that will rearrange your sense of what a 1430s painting can do. The Madonna of Canon van der Paele is, my god. Allow an hour. You will end up taking two.

Walk a canal at dusk. The canals are quiet at dusk. The lights come on. The buildings reflect double in the water and triple in the air. This is the photograph everyone takes; it is a photograph for a reason.

Find one of the small chocolatiers (not the big ones around the Markt). The Chocolate Line and Dumon are both excellent; ask anyone at your hotel for whatever new place has opened. Belgian chocolate, when it is made by a person rather than a factory, is a specific, slightly bitter, slightly silky thing that does not taste like any chocolate you've had at home.

Skip the carriages and the canal-boat tours unless you are with a child. They are fine. They are also touristy in a way that flattens the city for you.

When to go: early autumn or, my favorite, mid-November. The crowds collapse. The canals fog over. The bars are warm. You can walk into a Michelin-starred restaurant on a Wednesday at 7 pm. The temperature is brisk. Pack a coat.

Where to stay: not on the Markt. Stay one or two streets behind the main square. Smaller hotels and B&Bs are abundant and roughly half the price of the central ones. I have had three trips ruined by the bell tower at 6 am; I will not have a fourth.

A small honest moment to close. Bruges is a city that has, for better or worse, decided to be a museum of itself. There is a melancholy to that. You will see, occasionally, a young Belgian rolling their eyes at a tour group. You will see boarded-up shops on the side streets. The city is as much a project as a place. But when the light hits the canal in November, and the frites are hot, and a bell rings somewhere — the project, briefly, is enough.

Go for three days. Stay for four. Eat the frites twice.