Picket Fence Abroad: Travelogue #15: In Bruges.

Maybe that’s what hell is. All the rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges. - In Bruges (movie)

Having arrived in Leuven a day before orientation, I found myself suddenly occupied with going Orientation sessions, registering my presence with various university and city authorities, buying home wares and setting up my new apartment. This left me with literally no time to explore Leuven itself outside the university buildings.

In fact, the first Belgian city I really visited was Bruges, as part of the orientation program.

We went on the most splendid day - Belgium was going through a late autumn heatwave. All the cities around the country were basked in a kind of gentle warmth, blue skies, soft breeze, slightly browning leaves … don’t be fooled by the tranquility of my photos, because this turned out to be a misfortune in disguise. Bruges was simply suffocated by hordes of tourists.

Of course, the tourists came for a reason. For Bruges was so completely, endlessly pretty. While every European old town has its charms, rarely do you visit a place where beauty is so totalising. Every corner you turned was stunning, every view unfolded with delight, every house tucked out of sight looked quaint and cosy. And too much of a good thing made it feel unreal and Disney-like.

But Walt Disney could’ve never recreated this view.

In a way, it is good that Bruges these days is prospering because of international tourism. Historically, the city declined from being one of the major commercial centres of the 13th century to a place of poverty and stagnation by the 1500s. This was because the Zwin Channel, which had given the city its wealth, silted and quite literally turned Bruges into the backwaters of Belgium.

In hindsight, never has economic decline looked so good. Bruges’ fall into irrelevance helped preserve the city quite remarkably from the scourge of modernity. Well … that is, until hordes of tourists descended upon this city.

I know. It’s ironic and slightly hypocritical to be frowning upon tourism, especially when you are a tourist. But in a town like Bruges, with a population of 20,000 living within the ring of the city, tourists come in and suck the flavour out of the place. They turn everyday grocery stores into boutique touristy chocolatiers and lace shops selling “Belgian” lace made in Taiwan.

But by the time the sun was beginning to set, the tourist were already leaving in droves. We wandered through the now deserted squares in the centre of the city, relieved at last to be walking without bumping into other tourists, or being run over by horse carriages carrying families with heavy machinery cameras.

The town was growing quiet, and unlike Leuven - there was no music coming out of bars, no students racing through the streets on the bikes, no locals gathered on the sidewalks, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and looking exceedingly happy with life. Bruges was morphing back to the sleepy, backward town that it had been for hundreds of years before the coming of THE TOURISTS.

Its tranquility unnerved me. Achingly beautiful as it was, I could not stay in Bruges anymore.

“Let’s go home,” I said to new friends.