Gabriel Ríos – "Broad Daylight" (2005)

‘Cause this here be going on 

Until it’s not . . .

And then a little more

The Belgian city of Bruges – which is probably the best-preserved medieval city in all of Europe – is a place that I’ve wanted to visit for years.  

According to one travel writer, “If you set out to design a fairy-tale medieval town, it would be hard to improve on central Bruges.”

The Belfry of Bruges

The medieval belfry (bell tower) of Bruges is the city’s most famous building.  It’s featured prominently in the 2008 movie titled In Bruges:

Longfellow wrote a poem titled “The Belfry of Bruges,” which begins with these lines:

In the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry old and brown;

Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o'er the town.

The belfry was seriously damaged by fires in 1280, 1493, and 1741 – hence the “Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded” line.

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When I went to Bruges last month, I wasn’t disappointed – far from it.  But I don’t understand why the nearby city of Ghent doesn’t get a little more love.  

Like Bruges, Ghent has plenty of centuries-old canals, churches, cobbled streets, and distinctive step-gabled buildings.  

It has a belfry, too.  The belfry of Ghent (which was built between 1313 and 1380) is about 25 feet taller than the belfry of Bruges.

The Belfry of Ghent

What Ghent doesn’t have are the crowds of tourists that can overwhelm Bruges on a summer’s day.

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In early July, the days in Ghent are well over 16 hours long.  It doesn’t really get dark until around 11:00 pm.

Like Bruges, Ghent is full of buildings with stepped gables, the oldest of which date from the 12th and 13th centuries.  Here are a few examples:

The combination of step-gabled buildings, canals, and twilight skies is impossibly picturesque:

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I don’t think Bruges has anything like Ghent’s enormous Gravensteen castle, which dates back to 1180:

And Bruges doesn’t have anything like the Ghent Festival, an outdoor music and theatre festival that attracts some two million visitors to Ghent every July.

The Ghent Festival kicked off the day after my group was scheduled to leave the city and return to the U.S.  Construction crews were racing to complete dozens of outdoor stages and beer gardens while we were there.

Every Belgian brewery that I had ever heard of and a number of those I hadn’t heard of were represented at the festival.  The event’s organizers had arranged for hundreds of these urinals to be placed on the streets:

I realize that these urinals do relatively little to shield passers-by from the sight of men emptying their bladders.  But otherwise hundreds of thousands of beer-sodden young men would have been indiscriminately peeing everywhere – much like male dogs.

I’m not sure where all the beer-sodden young female festival-goers were supposed to go.

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about my last night in Ghent.  (SPOILER ALERT: I did my laundry.)

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Gabriel Ríos was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to Ghent when he was 17 to study painting.  He subsequently pivoted from art to music and quickly became a big deal on the local music scene.

“Broad Daylight” was a single from Ríos’s first album, Ghostboy, which was released in 2005.  

Click here to listen to “Broad Daylight.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon.

Haircut One Hundred – "Love Plus One" (1982)

Where does it go from here?

Is it down to the lake, I fear?

The Haar Zone in Bruges, Belgium is a kapsalon – a hair salon.  It’s also a place to rent bicycles.  

Here’s a recent online review of the Haar Zone:

My wife and I wanted to ride bikes [in Bruges] . . . . We found a bike rental store located below a tony hair salon north of [the Market Square in Bruges] and obtained our bikes that afternoon to have them ready to go early the next morning.  Discovering that the bike shop was owned by the people who ran the hair salon, and in need of a haircut, I subjected myself to top quality attention from two staffers and got a shampoo from a lovely attendant, a professional scissors cut and two bikes for 70 Euros.

I wasn’t in need of a haircut when I was in Bruges.  Plus I’ve had my hair cut by the same woman for well over 30 years, and wouldn’t dream of letting some random Brugeois schoonheidsspecialist get anywhere near my head with a pair of scissors.  

While getting a shampoo from a “lovely attendant” was tempting, I stuck to renting a bike.

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My destination was Damme, a charming little town of about 11,000 souls that’s an easy six- or seven- kilometer ride from Bruges. 

To get there, you ride northeast through Bruges until you hit a bike path that parallels the Damme Canal, which was one of a number of canals built by Napoleon over 200 years ago.  

If you’re not a biker, you can get from Bruges to Damme on the Lamme Goedzak, a 170-passenger boat that was built to resemble a Mississippi River sternwheeler:

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Damme’s handsome Stadhuis (town hall) was built in 1464:

If you look closely at that photo, you will see there are five flags flying in front of the Stadhuis.  

First, you have the flag of the city of Damme:

There is also the flag of West Flanders – the Belgian province in which Damme is located:

Next is the flag of Flanders – the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgian, which consists of five provinces (including West Flanders):

Of course, there is the Belgian national flag:

Finally, there is the flag of the European Union (or “EU”), which consists of 28 European nations:

There are several restaurants across the street from the Stadhuis, including one that is obviously proud of its frites:

Just outside of Damme stands the handsome Schellemolen windmill, which was built in 1867:

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Haircut One Hundred was a British new wave group.  

Three of the singles from the band’s debut album, Pelican West, were top-ten hits in the UK, and the album reached #2 on the UK albums chart in 1982.  

But frontman and songwriter Nick Heyward left the band shortly thereafter to pursue a solo career, and the group’s follow-up album flopped.  Hasta la vista, Haircut One Hundred!  

I have a vague memory of buying Pelican West.  I can’t imagine why.

Click here to listen to “Love Plus One.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: