Tag Archives: Belgium

Quiet Day In Uccle, Brussels.

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Day 22     Sunday, September 21, 2025

Our bnb is in a municipality of Brussels called Uccle. Brussels is the capital of Belgium, the headquarters of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO. Bob went for a walk today and saw several embassies.  There are 183 embassies in Brussels and Bob counted 17 embassies within a ten block radius of our bnb.
This is the Hungarian Embassy.

The Ukrainian Embassy…

…looks like an apartment building.

The Russian embassy is on a huge estate that is two blocks long.  No building in sight but lots of security cameras and some white swans in the pond.

There is an Equestrian Centre right in Uccle.

The Rose Farm was built at the beginning of the 13th century and given to the town in 1971. It was restored, and is now used for cultural activities

Bob walks through part of Wolvendael Park on the way home. There is a School of the Arts located in the park.

I stayed home, rested and worked a bit on my blog.  I discovered something interesting.  If I open my blog from the email that is sent out to those who follow my blog many of the photos are distorted and appear stretched out. So if you are having this issue on your cell phone just think of the email as a notification that there is a new post and type trudymason.com in your browser rather than opening the email and trying to look at the post there.  This has something to do with the way I am editing my photos but I am not able to figure out how to change it so this doesn’t happen. I still have a lot to learn.

We leave for Luxembourg tomorrow and the weather isn’t looking very great.  So far this trip we have only had two sunny warm days…maybe that is just what it is going to be, cooler and wetter than we would like… but we can’t do anything about the weather.

Bruges, Belgium

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Day 21     Saturday, September 20, 2025

We drive an hour and a half to visit Bruges.  First stop is the market which was supposed to be open for another hour but most vendors are packing up because of the cold and rain.

We see this huge contraption which I am sure is a spider, but it is not moving. I just looked up Bruges Giant spider and found this little video on Instagram…I was right, it is a spider! https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO3Y573jK1r/ 

It is miserable out, lots of umbrellas, lots of rain and it is cold.

We take refuge in this cathedral along with a lot of other people.  It isn’t very warm but it is at least dry. I sit and write in my journal and Bob checks out the cathedral.  I am content to just sit and rest for a bit.

There are large beautiful tapestries on both sides of the altar.

There is an announcement in several languages that the church is closing and will reopen in a couple hours after lunch.  So we walk to the huge central square, lined with beautiful old buildings.  It had stopped raining. The entire old city of Bruges is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The city was not damaged in either of the two World Wars so much of its Medieval heritage remained intact.

The streets are packed with tourists and it starts to rain again so we find a MacDonalds and hide out there for an hour and have our lunch.  It is dry and warm and no one cares how long we sit here.

The rain stops and we decide to get tickets for a canal boat ride.  There is a line but it moves fairly quickly and we watch the boats coming and going while we wait in line.

While we are waiting  I notice that there is a tight rope walker high in the sky!  If you look carefully at the previous photo you can see her in the top right corner just above the rooftops.  Yes, it is a woman, when she hangs upside down we see a ponytail. A rope almost 400m long was stretched at a height of 70m between the Belfry and the Church of Our Lady.

Soon we are travelling on the canals which give us a great view of many of the buildings in Bruges.

You can see the high wire attached to the cathedral tower.

We pass under many bridges, some of them so low we need to duck our heads.

The geese on the canals are owned by the city of Bruges and the penalty for killing one is five years in jail!

The city of Bruges is famous for its well-preserved medieval architecture, including many buildings featuring stepped gables.  Houses with lots of steps on the gables showed that the owner was rich.         
I wonder if the houses on the canal are damp, with the water lapping at their foundations.

This is the oldest bridge in Bruges and our driver/guide tells us that if you kiss under this bridge you will have everlasting love.  We kiss.

There are a variety of interesting buildings along the canals…

..and some great views.

There are also signs that Autumn is here.

This medieval building was built using wood, which was a fire hazard.  Most buildings in Bruges were built in a style known as Brick Gothic. 

After our boat ride we wander the streets and see this.  Lots of people are entering the building so Bob says we should follow them.  

It is an open house for the  new Brusk Art Gallery which will open in 2026.  We enter a room with shipping plastic wrap.  We aren’t sure what it is supposed to be…

…until we enter the next room and there is a  large tape art installation in the form of a web structure, and there are people climbing inside of them!  All of a sudden the giant spider we saw earlier makes sense.

I want to climb inside…my turn next!

It was interesting trying to walk around, but not really all that difficult.

This was so much fun!  Here I am inside this giant web-like structure.

There is the hole I climbed through to get inside.All too soon it is time to climb down. This was such fun.

There were several of these ‘webs’ in this huge room. What a clever idea.

Belgium is famous for its chocolate, which comes in all shapes and sizes!

There is a Carillon performance at 4:00.  We find a spot to sit just as it starts and listen to a variety of music for the next hour. The carillon is a piano like instrument that plays 47 bells.

One of the musicians was very young.

I do a bit of pen sketching while I listened to the music.  The last song played was Beethoven’s Ode To Joy and most of the audience stood up. The lady beside me told me that it is the anthem for the European Union, which has its headquarters in Brussels.  

This is an interesting building, skinny at the front and then widening out as along the streets on either side. 

We wanted to visit the Church of Our Lady which houses The Madonna and Child by Michelangelo. This world-famous white marble statue is the only work by Michelangelo that left Italy during his lifetime. But the church closed at 5:00 so we are out of luck.

We have to settle for viewing this poster.

We order a waffle with dark chocolate to share before the long drive back to our bnb. It  had a bit too much chocolate for us, but was still delicious.

Ypres, Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium

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Day 20     Friday, September 19, 2025

Today we visit the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium.

This museum uses a variety of displays to tell the story of the invasion of Belgium in World War I. There are holographs which use actors to tell the stories of actual people.

The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was about 40 million: estimates range from around 15 to 22 million deaths and about 23 million wounded military personnel, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. But it wasn’t just people that suffered during this war. More than 8 million horses, donkeys and mules died in WWI as well.  Such a horrendous loss of life!

These early gas masks provided some protection against chlorine gas, which was used for the first time during WWI,  but were only effective for about five minutes with concentrated doses of the gas. 

We take a break and climb 231 steps to reach the top of the bell tower. half way the steps change from a concrete spiral staircase to these metal steps, which are a bit scarier to climb.

We are always amazed at the size of the bells in these bell towers.

Soon we are outside taking in the views of the town and countryside.

We can see for miles.

I am very happy that the 231 steps down from the tower are cement.  I really didn’t like those metals ones.

After the clim to the top of the tower we have lunch and chatted with this Belgium couple who like to travel on their colourful bike.  We were surprised as they were both quite elderly.

Back in the museum.  There were lots of photos and film clips from the war.  They bring the horror of the war to life.

The bottom photo shows the damage done to the building that now houses this museum.  It was rebuilt after the war.

Men sleeping in closely packed conditions underground.  

There were displays of the full kit worn by soldiers from the countries that fought in the war. The first display with the kilt is from the Canadian Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment.These banners are for John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”.

A closer look reveals that there are photos of soldiers hidden in the poppies.

Taps is played at 8:00 every night at the Ypres Menin Gate memorial.

This memorial is engraved with the names of more than 54,000 officers and men whose graves are not known. I feel emotional when viewing these lists of those who died but were never found and buried.

Walking back to the car we pass a gallery with these amazing porcelain sculptures by Bénedicte Vallet.

Next stop is the Essex Farm Cemetery where the Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote his now famous poem “in Flanders Fields” after seeing poppies growing in battle-scarred fields. The poem was written in memory a friend who died at Ypres,  We pass some windmills on the way to the last cemetery we will visit on this trip.

Tyne Cot cemetery, located near Ypres, is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world and a memorial to the missing soldiers of World War I.  It contains the graves of 11,956 Commonwealth soldiers, primarily from the Battle of Passchendaele.

So many graves and 8,367of them are unidentified British or Commonwealth servicemen.

The wall in the background of this photo is engraved with the names of the 35,000 soldiers whose remains were never found or identified. One last stop at the Canadian Memorial which commemorates the actions and sacrifices of the Canadian Corps during the First World War’s Battle of Passchendaele. 

“The Canada Gate is the second of two linked ‘Portals of Remembrance’. The first is The Last Steps Memorial Arch, marking the spot in Halifax Nova Scotia where 350,000 Canadian soldiers took their last steps in Canada before embarking on ships for service overseas in Belgium and France during the First World War. For thousands, their last steps in life were taken here at Passchendaele. For those who survived, their lives were forever changed.”~ veterans.gc.ca

Another heavy duty day.

Visiting Brussels

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Day 18     Wednesday, Sept 17, 2025

We have fairly relaxing morning. We call our bank and sort out an issue with our debit card and last night we had to call one of our Mastercards because it got blocked…because we are in Belgium.  Yet they don’t want to know that we are travelling anymore!  So it caused problems when we tried to add it to our Apple Wallet.  Same thing has happened to our other Mastercard, so we still have that to sort out tonight. I guess we should have done some things before we left home…like putting our email address as the contact to verify our cards when we  use them online instead of it being our home land line!  But who knew?

Once we sorted that out I worked on my paper journal, drawing some animals at the Lille Zoo from photo reference.  Not as much fun as drawing at the zoo but it was cold and windy and we didn’t have a lot of time there.  Drawing from reference photos is a good way to familiarize myself with the shapes and anatomy of animals and birds. This helps when I am able to draw at zoos in person. I set a time limit for a page so that I don’t spend too long. It is more like drawing live that way.

We catch the train into downtown Brussels which involved a 20 minute walk because in order to use Brussel’s busses or trolley cars you need to have a contactless debit card or use Apple Wallet. Our problem is our Debit cards should work after we called the bank last night to sort out the problem, but they still don’t, so we can’t use them. My MC won’t load onto Apple Wallet because of problems trying to verify it! So we walk to a train station were we can buy a paper ticket. Unfortuntely there doesn’t seem to be any place near us to purchase paper tickets for the bus or trolley cars.  

A half hour later after a very smooth rain ride we arrive in Brussels.  First stop is to see the Mannekin Pis Fountain.  It is the most famous fountain in Brussels.  The last time we visited this little statue was 46 years ago on our first trip to Europe. 

I used to have the cutest little wooden plaque with sculpture of the Mannekin Pis but somehow lost it. I wanted to buy a new one…well that sure didn’t happen! All the souvenirs were incredibly tacky, and ridiculously expensive as you can see in this photo.  So no souvenir for me.  We did buy two postcards to send to our grandchildren and after we left the store the owner chased me down about a block away from the store.  He insisted that I had stolen one of the key chains that we had been looking at. He said he had it on camera, so we went back to the store and I told him, in French, to look at his camera. I said that I am not a thief and that I didn’t even touch the key chain he was accusing me of stealing. I am sure I looked guilty, I felt hot and I am sure my face was red. After a few minutes of conversation and looking at his security footage he admitted that he made a mistake and apologized. We chatted a bit more, and all was well. I shook his hand and said I understood how hard it must be when he does have people steal from him almost every day.  

We see one of the big pink sculptures that we saw all over Paris two years ago. The enormous  candy-pink sculptures created by Philippe Katerine are now on display in Brussels.

The Grand Palace Plaza is surrounded on all sides with very ornate buildings…

….including the City Hall…

…and the Brussels City Museum.  I am done in and need some tea and pastries. I think being accused of stealing was rather emotionally exhausting. It wasn’t easy to find a coffee shop. We had to walk several blocks but found one with a quiet table away from all the smokers.  We had a pot of mint tea with real mint leaves and the most delicious croissant and Portuguese tart.  

We pass a shop with these ‘toy’ cars in the window. The white and red car are €219.90 each, and the green and orange ones are ‘only’ €579.05 each!  This is $941.61 Canadian! I wonder who buys these expensive model cars.

The Cathedral Saints-Michel-et-Gudule is another enormous cathedral. 

The Nave stretches into the distance. The statues on the pillars are the Twelve Apostles. There are many stunning stained glass windows surrounding the ornate altar.

This sculpted scene called ‘Entombment’ is beautiful. Cathedrals often have amazing art work.

The pulpit is an intricately carved wooden masterpiece.

We are hungry and head back to this little square to buy some of Brussels famous frites with mayonnaise.  No photo, we were hungry and they were gone in no time. Bob is walking towards the train station.

We took a wrong turn on our way to the train station and discovered this enormous white Smurf. Of course we needed a photo!

I had a little rest beside several of these beautiful flower towers.

On our walk from the train station back to our apartment I see another sign that Autumn is coming.  It is still unseasonably cool for this time of the year. 16 Celsius and windy.

There are many very large houses along the walk home.  This one has its own magnificent tree.

We have never stayed in a neighbourhood with so many large houses…maybe mansions would be a better term?

There is such a variety of styles. Some traditional and some more modern looking.

This is the lane behind our bnb, which has a huge corner lot. This black cat was determined to cross my path as we returned from getting groceries, but I figured we had enough challenges for the day so I managed to avoid him!

Our bnb has its very own little robot lawn mower…it the cutest thing as it maneuvers itself about the yard cutting the grass.