Five Cities, Three Waffles, and One Very Long Free Day
It was a morning in Luxembourg in late December 2025, and it was seriously cold outside. For breakfast, as I almost always do when I eat at a hotel, I ordered Eggs Benedict and then went back to my room.
In front of the large window stood a modern sofa with organic curves, positioned almost perfectly for sitting and looking across at the railway station. My train to Brussels was leaving in about an hour. Outside looked thoroughly uninviting, so I sat down and watched the platforms for a while.
Perhaps trains have some peculiar ability to open old files in the brain, because something suddenly occurred to me that I had never connected in fifteen years: every single time I had entered Belgium, I had done so by train.
The first was by ICE from Frankfurt during my 2010/11 New Year trip. The second was in 2013, by Eurostar from London. The real objective that time was neither Brussels nor Paris, but travelling through the Channel Tunnel. In my imagination, ridiculous as it sounds now, that apparently involved at least some blue light and fish swimming somewhere above the train. What I got was an entirely ordinary tunnel: fascinating from an engineering point of view, visually about as exciting as any other tunnel. Brussels beat Paris for a considerably less romantic reason — the ticket was cheaper.
The third time was in the summer of 2014. After a more substantial trip around France, I took a train from Paris to Charleroi, slept there and flew from there to Krk early the next morning, then headed home. On that occasion, Belgium mostly served as an extended airport terminal. The fourth time I arrived from the Netherlands in 2019, and now I was preparing to enter for the fifth time, on an ordinary train from Luxembourg.
Once I lined up those visits in my head, it became obvious that the number of arrivals did not say very much by itself. I had almost entirely forgotten one of those trips, another had used Belgium merely as a transit stop, and in 2019 I had gone to the opposite extreme: trying to squeeze Brussels, Bruges, Ostend, Ghent and Antwerp into a single free day.
That day ended at 40,445 steps. Looking down at the station from my hotel window in Luxembourg, the question practically wrote itself: how much of Belgium can actually fit into 40,445 steps?
The Belgium I Barely Remember
The first time I stayed in Brussels was for several days during my 2010/11 New Year trip. One afternoon I decided to devote to what I considered the obligatory remainder of Belgium: Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges.
The route itself was not especially crazy. Those three cities are practically Belgium’s basic tourist package. The problem was that I was lazy enough to leave too late. I still saw something of Antwerp, but after that there was less and less daylight, more and more train travel, and by the time I reached Bruges I had arrived in an atmosphere that was excellent for Christmas lights and poor for actually getting to know a city.
You arrive, get off the train, walk around a little, return to the station and continue. At the time, that style of travelling apparently did not strike me as particularly problematic. Today I remember almost nothing of that circuit; paradoxically, I remember the trains much better.
Was it money wasted, or part of the education of the traveller I later became? Hard to say. Probably a little of both. I have almost no photographs from it, and that is how it will remain. There is no point reconstructing a memory that clearly failed to survive.
Straight from Schiphol into Belgium
It was Wednesday, 10 July 2019. I was attending a conference in Leiden, and the organisers had left that day free for our own programme. I chose Belgium for mine.
I was not staying in Leiden but near Schiphol. Not because Leiden had no hotels, nor because they were especially expensive, but for a reason much more characteristic of me: Leiden had no Marriott.
Schiphol, however, is not merely an airport. Beneath the terminal is one of the Netherlands’ main railway stations, practically halfway between Leiden and Amsterdam. Add Marriott status and points, the quality of the hotel, a fifteen- to twenty-minute train ride to Leiden, easy access to Amsterdam, and international trains stopping right beneath the airport, and you get a perfectly respectable multi-criteria optimisation problem.
My solution was called the Renaissance Amsterdam Schiphol Airport Hotel. At 7:34 I left Schiphol on a Thalys for Brussels.
Thalys was not new to me. During that 2010/11 New Year trip I had already travelled on it from Brussels to Paris and back, naturally in first class, and at the time the train itself had been part of the experience. A proper breakfast arrived at the seat: a large croissant, fruit, yoghurt, jam, butter and coffee. There was also free Wi-Fi. Today I would probably barely register that last perk, but in 2010 internet on a high-speed train crossing national borders still felt almost like an attraction in its own right.
I am old enough to remember when Wi-Fi on a train was an event. Nine years later I was once again sitting in a red Thalys. The seat in Comfort looked almost identical, but the croissant was gone.
This was not quite the general decline of civilisation, although it could easily have felt like it. In 2017 Thalys split its former first class into Comfort and Premium. The seats remained the same, but the meal at your seat was reserved for Premium. When the new structure was introduced, the lowest published fare on Brussels–Paris was €55 for Comfort and €115 for Premium.
So the croissant had not disappeared. It had simply gone Premium.
For that price difference, I was willing to accept its disappearance and look for calories in Brussels instead. As it turned out, that would not be a serious problem.
Thalys has since been integrated into Eurostar, and its former red trains are now part of the combined Eurostar network. My plan for the day was Brussels – Bruges – Ghent – Antwerp.
Ostend was not part of the plan.
The Two Brussels Stations I Merged into One
Belgium can begin confusing you linguistically the moment you step off the train. The country has three official languages, and Brussels is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, so the same station can be Bruxelles-Midi and Brussel-Zuid, while a few minutes away sits Bruxelles-Central, or Brussel-Centraal.
The word Midi did not help me either, because it somehow sounded as if it ought to mean something central or in the middle. In the station name, however, it means south. So Midi/Zuid is Brussels’ main international rail hub, while Central/Centraal — which is not the main station — at least honestly does what its name suggests: it sits in the city centre.
The distinction is perfectly clear to me now. During the 2010/11 trip I used both stations, but in my memory they merged neatly into one imaginary “main station in Brussels”. So when I stepped off the Thalys at Midi in 2019, I had an optimistic idea of how close the Grand-Place was.
It was not exactly around the corner.
I set off on foot. The first major building on the way was the Palace of Justice, after which I continued towards Boulevard de Waterloo, one of Brussels’ more upmarket shopping areas. And there was Abercrombie & Fitch.
I liked A&F at the time, both for its design and for the quality of the clothes, and there was no shop in Croatia. There was also a much more personal reason to go in: I had finally lost enough weight for buying their clothes to stop being a theoretical discipline.
That is not entirely irrelevant in the context of Abercrombie. For years, the brand had built its entire aesthetic around young, perfectly sculpted bodies, and its sales staff practically had to look as if a six-pack were part of the uniform. By 2019, it had already stepped back considerably from that philosophy.
In other words, both A&F and I had made certain adjustments in the meantime. I bought a T-shirt and was proud of it.
From there I continued towards the Royal Palace, Brussels Park and the Upper Town. I also passed the Musical Instruments Museum, or MIM, which I had visited before and would happily recommend to anyone with a little more time.
I then began descending towards the old centre through Mont des Arts. Its formal garden and view over the lower city remain one of my favourite parts of Brussels precisely because they form a transition between two very different faces of the city.
And then I reached the Grand-Place.
Twenty Euros for Something I Could Probably Have Made Better Myself
The Grand-Place is spectacular even after several visits. The Gothic town hall, the guild houses and facades designed by people who clearly believed that “a little more decoration” was always an acceptable solution create a square that does not need much assistance from tourist photography. That morning, however, I was interested in a waffle.
On the terrace at Debailleul I ordered a Brussels waffle and a hot chocolate. About twenty euros. The price itself would not have bothered me much if what arrived had looked like something worth twenty euros. I could not even complain much about the taste; the problem was that the waffle looked so meagre and forlorn that I was sure even I, who have no idea how to make waffles, could produce something more convincing with enough confidence.
The young waiter did not contribute greatly to the sense of luxury either. I would have expected him more readily behind a McDonald’s counter than on a terrace charging twenty euros for a waffle and hot chocolate. At least the Grand-Place performed its part flawlessly.
I saw Manneken Pis for the third time. He had not grown in the meantime: he still stood at 55.5 centimetres and maintained an unusually large international reputation for someone of those dimensions.
Then I headed towards Bruxelles-Central. The distinction I had managed to erase from my memory years earlier was finally obvious: Midi was where the international Thalys had dropped me, while Central was the useful station in the middle of the city from which I could continue towards Bruges on a Belgian train.
There was enough time before departure for a second waffle.
It was cheaper and better.
I did not even attempt to “finish” Brussels that day. I had returned to it before, and clearly I would return again. After all, this entire story began fifteen years later on a sofa in Luxembourg while I was waiting for yet another train to Brussels.
Bruges and the People Who Compare It to Venice
About an hour and a quarter later, I arrived in Bruges. Formally for the second time, though the first visit, given the darkness and how little of it remained in my head, can hardly be considered a serious introduction.
The problem was that by then I had already “seen” Bruges too many times elsewhere. It is constantly described as some kind of Venice of the North, a comparison I have always suspected is most enthusiastically used by people who have never been to Venice. On top of that, Bruges has spent decades functioning as a cinematic definition of the romantic European city: canals, bridges, belfries, brick houses, horse-drawn carriages and an atmosphere in which, judging by films, something fateful ought to happen every few minutes. So I arrived with completely unrealistic expectations.
From the station I walked through King Albert I Park, past the Church of Our Lady and then along the canals towards the historic centre. Burg, Blinde-Ezelstraat, Markt and the Belfry appeared almost exactly as I had spent years seeing them in photographs.
Bruges really is beautiful. It simply did not surprise me.
I was not trying to complete a list of attractions. I walked, turned towards whatever looked interesting and let the city determine the route. There simply was no time for museums, climbing the Belfry or taking a canal boat.
Somewhere on the way back towards the station came the third waffle of the day. I had clearly taken the mission seriously: this one cost four times less than the one on the Grand-Place and looked as though it had four times more calories. After my morning pride over the new A&F T-shirt, the quantity of dough and sugar produced a brief pang of guilt. By the end of the day, the step counter would more than compensate for that problem.
Bruges did not disappoint me; that would be unfair. The real city simply had to compete against the Bruges I had spent years constructing in my head, and that was never going to be an entirely fair contest.
At the station I was supposed to continue to Ghent.
Then I looked at the timetable.
Fifteen Minutes to the North Sea
Ostend was only about fifteen minutes farther west by train. By rail, Bruges is practically on the doorstep of the Belgian coast. I would have to return along the same line afterwards to continue towards Ghent, but those fifteen minutes made the detour so painless that skipping the sea seemed sillier than going.
Of course I went.
Ostend remained one of the clearest images of the entire day, which is a good result for a city that had not even been on the list a few minutes earlier. First there were those enormous red-orange metal shapes by the sea. At the time I had no idea what they were called or who had made them; I only knew they were strange and striking enough to be impossible to ignore.
And then came the beach — not a small urban beach you glance at between two sights, but a vast flat expanse of cold sand and the North Sea. The view pulled at me to take off my shoes and socks and simply start walking. For that I would have needed several hours I did not have.
Fish and seafood stalls lined the way towards the beach, but Ostend had run into the wrong traveller.
The Church of Saints Peter and Paul was attractive, neo-Gothic and worth seeing, but I am not going to pretend it left me speechless. The station, on the other hand, fascinated me. At the time I did not know why; I would only discover that later.
After the beach I returned to the station and this time really did leave for Ghent.
One Hour, Because the Timetable Said So
The journey from Ostend to Gent-Sint-Pieters took about 45 minutes. I had roughly an hour for Ghent, but not because I had carelessly left it the scraps of the day. The route had been built around the timetable, and I had bought my return ticket from Antwerp long in advance at a price that argued very persuasively against changing trains. I still had to get back to the Netherlands, so I had exactly as much time as the timetable allowed.
The plan struck me as elegant: get off at Gent-Sint-Pieters, walk through the city and, instead of retracing my steps, continue to Gent-Dampoort and catch the train to Antwerp from there. As it turned out, it was also quicker than returning to Sint-Pieters.
On the first stretch towards the centre, Ghent did not immediately give me the postcard effect that Bruges delivers almost as soon as you start walking. Wider streets gradually tightened, old facades became more frequent, and then, as I approached the historic centre, the view opened towards St Bavo’s Cathedral.
I stopped.
I do not know whether it was because I had expected so little from Ghent or simply because the view arrived at exactly the right moment, but it genuinely knocked me sideways. Only a few months after the trip I had already written that it impressed me more than all the towers of Bruges, so at least I know that the passing years did not embellish it afterwards.
Together with those strange red sculptures and the enormous beach in Ostend, it remained one of the three strongest images of the entire day.
An hour, however, remained an hour. The timetable was not impressed by the cathedral, so I continued towards Dampoort and caught the train to Antwerp.
The City I First Knew as a Ground Plan
About fifty minutes later, I arrived at Antwerpen-Centraal. The station alone is reason enough to arrive in Antwerp by train. The large stone hall, the dome, the glass and iron above the tracks and the multiple levels of platforms give it a monumentality that makes the expression “railway cathedral” feel not particularly exaggerated.
From the station I walked down Meir towards the historic centre. Antwerp has a serious fashion reputation, but that day I had not come to study Belgian design. My reason was much older and more personal.
I first heard of Antwerp in my first year of secondary school, when an art-history assignment required me to draw the ground plan of its cathedral. Some cities you first encounter on a map; Antwerp I first encountered as the geometry of a church.
I had first seen it in person during that almost erased 2010/11 circuit. Now I was finally approaching it in daylight, early enough to properly look at the building I had tried to draw correctly decades earlier. Naturally, it was under renovation. After that many years, perhaps expecting the facade to cooperate as well would have been asking too much.
From the cathedral I continued towards Grote Markt, the town hall and the Brabo Fountain, then towards the Scheldt. By then the counter was already seriously approaching 40,000 steps. It had not reached them yet, but the number was coming, and my legs knew it before the watch did.
40,445
I returned towards Antwerpen-Centraal and bought a large frappé at Starbucks. At that stage of the day I was not especially concerned about whether it belonged to authentic Belgian gastronomy; I needed sugar.
At half past ten I boarded a train back towards Schiphol. For as long as I was sitting, I was still functioning. The real bill arrived only after I got back to the hotel.
I literally could not feel my legs. Not in the ordinary tourist sense of “my legs were killing me”, but in the very real sense that somewhere over the last few kilometres they had stopped being parts of my body that reliably transmitted information. The counter stopped at 40,445 steps.
I took enough ibuprofen that my GP would probably have raised a very serious eyebrow, and a long hot bath did not work miracles either. A person should, apparently, know his limits. That day I obtained a fairly precise measurement of where one of mine lay: somewhere before 40,445.
How Much of Belgium Fits into One Day?
The view of the station pulled me out of July 2019 and back into the cold morning of late 2025. I was still sitting on the sofa by the window in Luxembourg, but the hour that had originally seemed more than sufficient for breakfast, sitting around and remembering had almost disappeared. My train to Brussels was about to leave.
Forty thousand four hundred and forty-five steps six years earlier had not allowed me to “see Belgium”. But they had left behind a few images that survived far better than the itinerary: those strange red sculptures by the sea, the vast cold beach in Ostend and the sudden view towards the cathedral in Ghent.
Two of those three images came from a city that had not even been in the plan that morning; the third from a city the timetable had granted barely an hour. I had waited years for Bruges and built it into something almost mythical in advance; Ghent received nothing like that treatment. Memory clearly does not care much about the schedule we prepare for it.
Five cities fit into 40,445 steps. How many of them stay is another question entirely.
Fifteen years after my first arrival, I was once again travelling towards Belgium by train, this time without any plan to cover half the country in a day and with a somewhat better idea of what 40,000 steps do to the human body.
I put on my coat, closed the hotel-room door and headed towards the station.
I had already “seen” Brussels several times.
What it would show me this time, I was about to find out.
For Those Who Want to Know More
While preparing for that slightly unreasonable walk through Belgium, I gathered far more information than could possibly fit into a single day, and certainly more than made sense in the story itself. It was useful to me nonetheless: the cities stopped being merely a sequence of attractive facades, squares and railway stations and gained a context that is difficult to absorb while walking through them for only a few hours.
So I kept a few notes. Not as an extension of the itinerary or a checklist of things one ought to see, but as an explanation of some of the places that caught my attention that day — sometimes before I even understood why.
Brussels: Between the Upper and Lower City
The Palace of Justice was the first monumental building on my walk from Midi towards the centre, and its scale is no accident. Joseph Poelaert designed it as a representative seat of Belgian justice; construction began in 1866 and was completed in 1883. From parts of Brussels the building dominates the skyline, which helps explain why it stayed in my memory even though I merely passed it that day.
Not far beyond it begins a very different Brussels: palaces, parks, museums and the representative avenues of the Upper Town. The Royal Palace is not the royal family’s everyday residence but the monarch’s official working palace. Even the title is interesting: the Belgian monarch is not the King of Belgium, but the King of the Belgians — a small linguistic distinction that seems rather appropriate for a complicated country in which even a railway station changes name depending on the language in which you read it.
The Grand-Place, towards which I was descending, owes much of its present appearance to disaster. The French bombardment of 1695 destroyed most of the houses surrounding the square, after which the guilds rebuilt them rapidly in stone. That helps explain why, despite the almost competitive quantity of decoration on the facades, the square feels surprisingly coherent.
The Flower Carpet that I have been trying to catch for years does not appear every summer but traditionally every other year in mid-August. Manneken Pis is a somewhat more reliable resident: the original bronze figure from 1619 is now kept in the Brussels City Museum for safekeeping, while a copy stands at the fountain. His collection of costumes has grown past a thousand — an impressive wardrobe for a man 55.5 centimetres tall.
Three Waffles Are Not the Same Thing
My practical research into Belgian waffles that day did have a certain theoretical basis. A Brussels waffle is typically rectangular, light and airy, while a Liège waffle is denser, more irregular in shape and sweeter because of the pearl sugar in the dough.
Theoretically, I can explain the difference. Empirically, I can only confirm that price was not a particularly good predictor of quality that day.
Bruges: How a Trading City Became a Romantic Backdrop
Bruges was not created as a set for romantic films, although today it can sometimes feel that way. Its medieval rise was built on trade, waterways and Flemish cloth. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was one of north-western Europe’s major commercial and financial centres, a place where northern goods, Italian merchants, bankers and the Burgundian court met.
After the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the city’s relationship with Maximilian of Austria deteriorated badly. Parts of the court, the merchant community and capital gradually moved elsewhere, Antwerp grew stronger, and Bruges simultaneously faced increasing difficulties with its access to the sea. The economic decline was hardly good news for the people who lived there, but it had one consequence that modern visitors can appreciate: Bruges escaped some of the large-scale later redevelopment and preserved an unusually coherent historic centre.
The Church of Our Lady, which I passed not long after leaving the station, has a 115.5-metre brick tower, among the tallest brick church towers in the world. Even more interesting is what lies inside: Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, one of only a few of his works to leave Italy during his lifetime.
The Markt is dominated by the 83-metre Belfry. Reaching the top requires 366 steps, and its carillon has 47 bells. After the day eventually ended at 40,445 steps, I have had little difficulty living with the fact that I did not add those 366.
Blinde-Ezelstraat, or Blind Donkey Street, also has a story more interesting than the name alone. An inn called Den Blinden Ezel was already recorded there in the late fifteenth century. According to the most commonly cited explanation, its name was connected with donkeys used in brewery malt houses, where they walked in circles to drive a mill; their eyes were covered to prevent the endless circling from making them dizzy. The donkey gave its name to the inn, and the inn gave its name to the street.
After all the romantic bridges, canals and belfries, perhaps the blind donkey is one of the more authentic details of the medieval city.
Ostend: Where the Railway Ended at the Sea
Those enormous red-orange forms I found beside the sea have a name: Rock Strangers. They are the work of Belgian artist Arne Quinze, and their aggressive colour and irregular metal shapes deliberately clash with the grey sea and the neutral urban space around them. I knew none of that at the time; I only knew they were difficult to forget.
What surprised me even more afterwards was the story of the railway station, which had struck me at first sight as somehow more important than a regional station in a city of that size ought to be.
The present station in Ostend was built between 1907 and 1913 as Oostende-Kaai, the city’s second maritime station, and formally opened on 1 August 1913. The railway did not end at the sea by accident. The complex was designed as a transfer point between trains and shipping services, while the Hotel Terminus Maritime occupied the left wing. A journey over land effectively ended where a journey by sea began.
That explains much better why the station stayed in my memory. Its monumentality was not decorative excess applied to an ordinary station but part of the idea of a place where one form of travel continued as another.
And beyond it lay that vast sandy beach that had made me want to take off my shoes and simply keep walking. Sometimes history and personal impression do line up rather neatly in the same place.
Ghent: What Lies Behind a Single View
St Bavo’s Cathedral did not stay in my memory because I knew a great deal about it before arriving. Quite the opposite: Ghent had the least time that day and the fewest expectations attached to it, which may be exactly why the view towards the cathedral hit me so strongly.
The building developed over centuries from earlier churches on the same site, acquiring most of its present Gothic character during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its most famous treasure, however, is inside: the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, completed in 1432. It is one of the key works of Early Netherlandish painting.
The history of the altarpiece is almost as dramatic as its artistic importance. Its parts have been moved, removed and returned repeatedly over the centuries, while the panel known as the Just Judges was stolen in 1934 and has never been recovered.
That day I made it no farther than the view towards the cathedral. For an hour in Ghent, that was not nothing: that view became one of my strongest images of Belgium in 2019.
Antwerp: From a Ground Plan to the Scheldt
Antwerp grew for centuries along the Scheldt. The river connects it to the North Sea and is the reason the city developed into one of Europe’s major ports. Trade, ships, diamonds and, later, fashion are simply different layers of a city whose international importance has always depended on the ability of goods and people to arrive — and to leave again.
For me, however, Antwerp began with a cathedral I knew long before I knew the city. The Cathedral of Our Lady was built over several centuries, and its 123-metre tower still defines the skyline of the historic centre. Its interior contains major works by Rubens as well, but my own connection to it will remain far more mundane: the ground plan I had to draw in my first year of secondary school.
A few steps away, on Grote Markt, stands the Brabo Fountain. It depicts the Roman hero Silvius Brabo, who according to legend killed the giant Druon Antigoon, cut off his hand and threw it into the Scheldt. From this came the popular story that the name Antwerp derives from the Dutch hand werpen — “to throw a hand”. It is a good legend, certainly good enough to occupy the city’s main square, but linguists do not regard it as a serious etymology of the city’s name.
I prefer it that way. The city I had first encountered as the outline of a cathedral had, several decades later, acquired a river, a legend involving a severed hand and one of the most beautiful railway stations I had ever seen.
That is already a respectable improvement on a ground plan.