A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Bruges is like stepping into a real life Belgian-Flemish masterpiece. We were completely charmed, and could happily have skipped Gent to spend an extra day there - as it was, we had only planned on one night but ended up liking it so much we decided to sacrifice Antwerp for a second night, which was all we could afford time-wise. With, again, a festival on, accommodations were scarce, and a flood of emails sent out the day before in...

Gent, our guidebook said, might be a better choice than Bruges, offering similarly pretty scenery but without quite as many tourists. As we've done both at this point, I beg to differ on that opinion. Part of our disappointment with Gent was certainly that it, like so many places at this time, was readying for a summer festival - meaning absolutely the whole town was covered in construction, rendering it anything but attractive. We have not one single nice pho...

How to console ourselves upon leaving Paris? Perhaps it helped that Belgium promised some comparable standards for food, the relief of slowing the pace down a bit, the anticipated charm of read about smaller towns, and a good variety of things visually pleasing…oh yes, and a reputation for outstanding chocolate, and beer apparently elevated to an art form, though I remained sceptical on the latter. Having recently left the much coveted regions of French wine a...

If Marlene Dietrich was going through my head in Berlin, then Edith Piaf singing, "Sous le Ciel de Paris", was the theme song in Paris. Both of us had been here before: Mico last when he was 12, and I 18 years ago, in the low season in October. I fell in love immediately with the city then and felt just as enamoured this time around. The weather was certainly better this time of year, hot and sunny, but if I were to choose, I would aim again for the low or sho...

With rarely enough time to sleep sufficiently, keeping up with writing the blog has been near impossible, so although we are now in Bruges, Belgium, on our way to Amsterdam, the next few posts will be catch up on the last week. I am entering them under the date we were there just to keep track. We found ourselves, both of us, completely blank the other day as we tried to recollect Strasbourg, which is where we last left off. The first thing that came back, fina...