We’re Back: Belgium and Beyond

October 31, 2023

Hello again! We have been having so much fun traveling around that we got behind on our regular updates. We will be posting lots over the next couple weeks to get you all caught up on our adventures.

Jake here:

Bruges was probably one of the nicest cities I’ve ever visited. It has a large bell tower, the belfry, that chimes with beautiful music every 15 minutes. Josh and I climbed to the top and had a great view of the city. We listened to the music from the bells at the top of the tower which cut through to your soul like a knife and drowned your ears with earth shattering beautiful noise. One evening we listened to a concert where the belfry was played like an instrument using a keyboard attached to the bells. All of the bells are connected mechanically to the worlds largest bass drum it is a truly ginormous musical instrument. (This video can give you an idea of what they sound like). Just below the bell tower, the town square turns into a farmers market with local produce, vegetables, sausages and cheeses, and delicious Belgian waffles. We also visited a beautiful church with a relic of the holy blood of Jesus Christ and where I sat in awe of the beautiful stained glass and reverence of the church. The colors radiated with such beauty that is only surpassed by one thing I have seen, and that’s my girlfriend. This was promptly followed by a visit to a torture museum which was quite fun and gross. While also in the city, Josh and I went to a wonderful diamond museum where they showed how diamonds are cut into different shapes. Bruges was once the center of diamond cutting in Belgium. The museum also has a robot that makes diamonds and spoke in another language to me. It was a truly unique museum that I throughly enjoyed. This city is like Mama Mia the musical, straight fire, the goat, all that and a bag of potato chips. The icing on the cake Dr. Evil was raised here in Austin Powers.

After leaving Bruges I travelled to Ypres by myself and got on a bus found out it was the wrong bus and then waited for 30 minutes just to be blocked by the sign and missed the bus again. I decided to walk 2 miles back to town to get on the other bus which took me until I was a mile away from my destination at the Sanctuary Woods Museum and Cemetery. This site maintains some trenches from WW1 and was truly a chilling place. I walked through rows of artifacts of soldiers who lived and died right where I was standing. The trenches cut into the earth like an open wound and the rust of the metal which was pierced and jagged and the nature which seized opportunities in the weaknesses and sprang forth. Rusted bombs and barbered wire strewn on the ground and dents in the ground showed where artillery had up ended the earth onto the soldiers in the trench beside them. Upon completing the museum I walked past the graves of those men where sometimes a line of graves read the same date of death with different dates of birth each one a man just like me cut down from his life. One stood out to me which mentioned he was a loving father and wife, I wondered if his wife had ever gone to where he died, or if he thought of her when he died or did it happen so quickly that there was no time to think. Those trenches and cemetery will forever be burned into my mind.

We also spent some time in Brussels. It has the EU headquarters, which was so cool to learn about. It also had a comic book convention while we were in town which was fun to see because it was all in different languages.

Josh here:

While Jake took a trip to the WW1 site, I visited the fine arts museum in Ghent. The collection presents a broad selection of Flemish art. From the collection, two sections stood out to me. One was the Ghent Alterpiece—among the most well known of Jan Van Eyek’s works. Currently under restoration, one section of the museum invites visitors to watch researchers at work. Each panel is being processed by a multilayer x-ray scan to understand painting techniques and chemical compositions of the original artist. Findings help the restorers to keep as close to original as possible. I also spent a good deal of my afternoon wondering around the parks and canals of Ghent before catching up with Jake in Brussels for dinner. While also in Belgium, we had a chance to catch up with Johanna, a friend of mine who lives nearby and works in Brussels. She is one of many friends I have living across Europe who I have gotten to know through volunteering with National Model United Nations. She and her fiancé and their pup came down to meet us for breakfast and we shared some wonderful conversation and a walk around the central city and EU headquarters.

Bruges