In Bruges

Between cobblestones and commerce

By Trotternama

August 8^th, 2025

The diesel fumes from the Amsterdam express still clung to my jacket as I stepped into Bruges' Markt square at half past nine. I was carrying three hours of recycled air in my clothes and the particular exhaustion that comes from solo travel. Medieval bells chimed the hour while a tour guide thrust a QR code toward a cluster of Germans clutching coffee cups like rosaries. The morning light caught the Gothic spires and the Samsung screens of nearby cafés with equal indifference.

I had come, like the others, to find something. What exactly remained unclear.

The cobblestones were already slick with the morning's commerce—chocolate wrappers, cigarette butts, and the occasional dropped waffle creating a contemporary mosaic between stones laid down when Bruges was the Venice of the North. Before the sea abandoned it. Before the tourists rescued it from irrelevance.

The morning air tasted of chocolate and nostalgia.

Walking toward the city center, I passed the exact corner where Resistance fighters had once painted "V for Victory" on medieval walls, where Wehrmacht boots had echoed off stones. Now a funeral procession made its stately way down Wollestraat—black horses with purple plumes, mourners dressed like extras from a period drama. Behind the hearse, a man in coveralls swept cigarette butts with the methodical patience of someone whose grandfather had swept up bomb debris with the same quiet dignity. Nobody photographed him.

Death gets the horse-drawn carriage. We get the tour bus.

The Markt opened before me like a pop-up book that had somehow survived the paper shortage of wartime. These Gothic spires had watched Luftwaffe formations pass overhead on their way to London. These gabled houses had hidden Jewish families in spaces behind medieval walls thick enough to muffle crying children.

Technology bent to cobblestones here. Modernity was just a genuflection.

"Seventeen euro for hot chocolate!."It was a woman from Birmingham. Her voice carried the particular indignation you feel when you realise that paradise comes with credit card surcharges.

I ordered it anyway. Seventeen euros.

The waitress—Nigerian accent smoothed by years of navigating Flemish customers and their peculiar relationship with former colonies—brought a cup the size of a communion bowl, filled with liquid so dense it seemed to have absorbed the weight of Mesoamerican gods. This wasn't just hot chocolate; it was molten ancestry, the distilled essence of cacao beans that had traveled further than most people ever would.

Good enough to justify the pilgrimage.

I watched her hands as she set it down and placed the saucer with unconscious grace, Behind her, the owner counted receipts. Each transaction, another small victory against European immigration mathematics.

Commerce becomes ceremony when survival is memory.

I climbed the Belfry because that's what solo travelers do—we seek elevated perspectives to justify our elevated loneliness. Twelve euros for 366 steps toward whatever revelation waited at the top.

The stone steps narrowed as they spiraled upward through chambers where, just eighty years ago, Belgian resistance fighters had operated clandestine radio equipment in the shadow of bells that had rung out liberation in September 1944. My breathing echoed in chambers where medieval watchmen had once scanned horizons for armies that might or might not come, their vigil as solitary as mine, their view purchased with the same currency of physical effort.

At step 200, I passed an elderly German woman. Still climbing. Still breathing hard. Still married to the same patient man who'd learned that love sometimes means ascending medieval towers for reasons that can't be explained in any language.

"Warum?" she gasped.

"Für die Geschichte," he replied.

But at the top, something shifted. Below us, Bruges spread like a manuscript painted by God's own hand. Red tile roofs bleeding into silver canals that caught light like scattered coins. Tourists reduced to moving dots in an ancient pattern that had survived Burgundian dukes and Spanish occupation and German bombs and the more insidious invasion of organized tourism.

The German woman forgot her breathlessness. Her husband forgot his cynicism. For thirty seconds, we all forgot we were customers. The view was worth it. We all stood there, temporarily wealthy in ways that couldn't be measured in currencies

Lunch was at a restaurant where the carbonade flamande arrived like a small miracle of transformation. Twenty-eight euros for beef stew. Almost highway robbery disguised as tradition. The chef worked alone behind the kitchen glass with the concentration of a surgeon, his movements carrying the genetic memory of recipes passed down generations.

"You're paying for authenticity," observed a nearby Dublin accent seasoned by disappointment. But this wasn't just beef and beer. This was the taste of survival itself. How tough meat becomes tender through patience, how harsh seasons become bearable through the alchemy of time and flame. Every spoonful carried the weight of kitchens and winters and the persistent human refusal to accept that comfort is luxury.

The meat dissolved like promises kept.

The woman across the table nodded knowingly to her partner. "Could get better in Temple Bar for half the price." But they finished every bite. And ordered dessert.

Hope disguised as chocolate mousse.

Carefully avoiding the tourist traps on the main square like a reformed alcoholic steering clear of his favourite bar, I reached a chocolate shop on Katelijnestraat. A street that had once been renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse for four terrible years. Here I watched an Ethiopian woman behind the counter explaining pralines to American tourists whose grandfathers might have liberated this very corner in 1944. Her hands moved like a pianist's across glass cases that reflected light like jewelry displays, each chocolate positioned with museum precision.

"This one, very traditional," she said, pointing to a truffle that was, according to fine print manufactured in Germany from Ecuadorian cacao. The Americans nodded with the reverence of pilgrims receiving communion. They bought seventy euros worth. Enough guilt chocolate to last until Christmas confession.

It was her hands. The way she selected each piece, not grabbing but choosing, each chocolate placed with the care of someone who understood that that commerce too could become benediction when it was etched with desire.

The Groeningemuseum held Van Eyck's "Madonna with Canon van der Paele" like a relic in a climate-controlled reliquary—one of the paintings that had somehow survived when Nazi art specialists arrived in 1940 with their carefully prepared shopping lists, their systematic catalogues of cultural appropriation. The locals had hidden this one. Moved it. Lied about it. Risked execution for the privilege of keeping beauty local.

A group of art students sketched with the intensity of archaeologists excavating, their teacher speaking in reverent whispers about luminosity and faith—the same qualities that had sustained resistance fighters. The belief that some things were worth preserving even at the cost of everything else.

But there, in the corner there was a Japanese businessman photographing himself in front of a minor masterpiece, his camera flash bouncing off protective glass. The guard said nothing. His face held the patient expression of someone who'd learned that some battles against human nature aren't worth fighting.

The students drew. The businessman posed. The guard watched. Van Eyck's painted eyes observed us all with the eternal patience of artistic immortality.

Some things survive commerce. Most don't.

A few transcend it entirely

The afternoon light turned the canals into mirrors, reflecting the gabled houses. A swan glided past a discarded Starbucks cup, both equally indigenous now to this carefully maintained medieval theme park. Horse-drawn carriages clopped past Tesla taxis, their drivers offering commentary in whichever language promised the largest tip.

At the Basilica of the Holy Blood, pilgrims and tourists merged into a single queue, their motivations indistinguishable from the outside. Inside, the supposed relic of Christ's blood drew whispered prayers and camera flashes in equal measure. Faith and curiosity, it seemed, made similar pilgrimages.

By late afternoon, the market square had transformed itself into an open-air museum of human survival. Street performers drew circles of spectators who photographed but rarely tipped. A Lithuanian accordion player earned more in twenty minutes than the museum guard would in two hours, his repertoire consisting entirely of movie themes that made middle-aged tourists weep with recognition.

I walked past the Brugse Vrije , its moat now filled with water taxis instead, its walls that had once protected medieval lords now protecting tourists searching for authentic experiences. The fortress sat like a stone ship, its battlements gazing down at conquests more thorough than any medieval siege.

Time hadn't quite stopped in Bruges—it had simply learned to move sideways, like water finding its way around obstacles. The medieval core had remained unchanged while everything else flowed around it. Tourism replacing commerce, guided tours replacing genuine wandering, photo opportunities replacing contemplation. Only the stones remembered when the moat had been the distance between survival and surrender.

When these walls had meant defense over decoration.

By evening, I found myself at the Minnewater—the Lake of Love that had once been a working harbour before the sea abandoned Bruges for deeper ports. Before the Germans requisitioned the boats, before tourism filled the silence.

A local man fed swans with the regularity of daily prayer, his movements carrying the rhythm of routine that had somehow persisted through occupation, liberation, reconstruction, and the slower conquest of organised tourism.

When I asked about the lake's history, he shrugged with the eloquence of someone whose family had witnessed too many transformations to be surprised by any of them.

"Was commerce once. Ships. Then was war. After war, it was quiet. Now is..." He gestured toward couples posing for photographs while swans navigated between smartphones with aristocratic indifference. "Now it is just beautiful. Sometimes beautiful is what survives when everything else fails, no?"

Sometimes beauty is the only successful resistance.

The five o'clock train back to Amsterdam arrived with punctuality that would have impressed the Wehrmacht. As Bruges receded into Belgian countryside—fields that had fed medieval cities, soaked up wartime blood, and now grew sugar beets for European Union subsidies—I calculated my day's receipts

Transport, chocolate, lunch, museum, coffee. The mathematics of authenticity to see a city that had learned to commodify its own survival. But that Swan, gliding past the Starbucks cup with such determined grace—that had been free. As was the Nigerian waiter's genuine demeanour, the street sweeper's brief smile and the art students' fervent sketching. The real Bruges, it seemed, lived in the margins of its own tourist performance, persistent as weeds growing between cobblestones laid down by hands long dead.Time hadn't stopped so much as learned to move in circles, where history wasn't museum exhibit but lived experience layered like sediment—medieval stones beneath Wehrmacht boots beneath Canadian liberators' treads beneath modern tourists' sneakers.

The train gathered speed toward Amsterdam's honest chaos, carrying me away from a city that had mastered the art of being conquered without surrendering, of preserving its essential self while adapting its surface to whatever invaders demanded: Burgundian dukes, Spanish governors, German occupiers and tour groups with seventeen-euro budgets.

Behind us, bells chimed six o'clock over cobblestones that had outlasted empires, ideologies, and occupation currencies, over a city that had learned the difference between bending and breaking, between accommodation and capitulation.