By Sustainability Research Fellow Katie Koenig
As the end of the semester crept closer for us Castle students, some friends and I were determined to get in some kind of holiday cheer as a last hurrah before the abysmal weeks of finals and finals prep were upon us. Although the first snow in Kasteel was a week after our trip, right at the end of November, we were committed to finding some kind of market celebration or tradition, hopefully with a bit of winter wonderland weather to go with it.
Our choice of destination? Bruges, Belgium.
Planning
Planning was, as was typically at that point in the semester, complete chaos. We were four days before we were planning on leaving when we finalized who would be coming with us—me, my roommate, and a mutual friend—and hurried to get the cheapest hotel available. We paid for an Airbnb in Blankenberge, a ten minute train ride from central Bruges and directly on the coast with a beachfront view. Bruges itself was ridiculously expensive, almost three times the price compared to anywhere we found outside the city proper. It certainly wasn’t a hard decision for us.
Next issue: work. My roommate—the one with her name on the reservation, mind you—nearly skipped out of the trip entirely two days before we were set to leave because of an unexpected paper. We only avoided complete anarchy because I also had plenty of work I needed to get done that weekend, so we all agreed to leave Well Friday afternoon and leave Blankenberge Sunday morning. We also planned in time to all do work Friday evening, Saturday morning until lunch, and all agreed to keep each other to our promises of doing work on the long train rides we had planned to get to Bruges and back.
Our final issue was the climate. We asked for winter weather (my friend particularly wanted to see first snow; for all that we knew it would be impossible that weekend, considering we were right on the coast), and the world certainly delivered. We arrived to heavy rainfall, and then had to walk fifteen minutes from the station to our destination. On the last block to the beach, we had to climb a steeply inclined road that acted as a powerful wind tunnel for the winds buffeting the coast. A hundred plus feet, even at an incline, reasonably takes about a minute. We were stuck there for two full songs in my alt-rock playlist (most of which were at least four minutes long), and nearly lost an umbrella, a hat, and ourselves to a particularly strong minute of gales.
You think you know what wind is, living in Boston, but that’s a lie you tell yourself in the hopes that that wind is as bad as it gets.
When we finally arrived at the Airbnb, we had to wait a few minutes for the owner to arrive and let us in. I got distracted taking pictures of doggy paw prints on the beach, of which I counted at least five separate print types before my friends called me, worried they’d legitimately lost me when I had disappeared by the time the owner had arrived. After a fun conversation of promising to tell people where I was going during a storm in pitch black, we finally got settled.
(In my defense, it was much more manageable outside of the wind tunnel formed with at least five stories and unimpeded roads directly perpendicular to the coast.)
Of course, that’s when the owner informed us that the storm had started up just that week, and was scheduled to last exactly the length of our stay in Blankenberge. Yay, winter.
Saturday Morning
Now, the main reason we were interested in going to Bruges in the first place was for their infamous Christmas markets. There were two of them within the city itself, about a ten minute walk between each of them, and either about a ten minute bus from the train station. We had plans for lunch, hot cocoa, gift shopping, and pictures of the gorgeous lights once it got dark enough.
After a morning of work, we hopped on the train from Blankenberge to Bruges. Yet again, it was raining, so instead of walking twenty five minutes to the nearest Christmas market, we took the bus. Conveniently, it was free, either for the weekend or for the holidays, but whatever the reason, we were glad to get out of the icy weather for a time.
Thankfully, we were just far enough from the coast that it stopped raining relatively quickly, so we fully enjoyed browsing the shops in the stalls and buildings nearby. It was an amazing experience, not least because of the truly ridiculous number of drink stalls around. The second market was the main one, in a much larger square and with more tchotchkes on display than just food and drinks, though there were those too.
Fairy lights were strung up between the walkways and stalls, people bustling everywhere and standing in chaotic lines to get hot food and see what was on display. There were ornaments by the dozen, jewelry and racks upon racks of iconic winter beanies with pom poms on the top.
My personal favorite stall was a large jewelry-hat one. They had a metal lattice hanging just under the awning, stretching out across the counter with necklaces hanging from every corner. They all had leather strands, and at the end were a variety of crystals and stones. I had to lean across a particularly eye-catching periwinkle beret to see better, but I noticed a few of the necklaces had claw pendants.
They were metal dragon-like talons, curled in a spherical shape to hold a crystal orb gently within the claws. There were a few with ridged scales that I instantly knew I had to get for a cousin. One of the men working the counter saw me looking, and asked if I needed anything. I asked if they had one of the textured claws holding a carnelian stone instead of the obsidian on display, since I really wanted the sparkling, fiery orange within the polished steel.
There weren’t any, but I didn’t have time to be disappointed before he offered to switch out the stones for me. I jumped on the opportunity, and watched wide-eyed as he grabbed the two necklaces I’d been eyeing—the ridged talons with the black stone, and the smooth textured one with the carnelian I wanted—a lit candle, and pliers to gently pry the claws apart.
Ten minutes, ten euro, and my heartfelt thanks later, I had in my hands the best gift I’d nabbed all semester. For context, my cousin—technically a family friend, since her mother babysat me and my siblings for so long our families still kept in touch—lived in an old house covered with statues of Bast, dragons of all shapes and sizes, full sized swords, fifteen cats, and her parents (who ran a cat rescue technically out of their house, since the organization didn’t have an official office). I knew it would be a perfect gift.
I’m still smug that I’ll win the ‘best gift competition’ this year. (Unless my mom one-ups me, which is pretty likely, I’ll admit).
Saturday Night
My friends got a few notable things of their own (four gnomes, a purple beret, and a waffle on a stick). We still had a couple hours to burn before night fully fell on the city and we could knock off the last thing on our travel wish-list, so we futzed around a thrift store for a while.
I doubt I’ll do the view of the lights justice, but here are three of my observations of the things that really stuck out to me.
One: for some reason, the street lights were blue. I don’t mean pastel, or tinted, or anything like that. I mean a burn-your-retinas, the-world-is-a-different-color, what-on-Earth, rich sapphire.
Two: the rain started up again by the time night fell. The only lights came from hanging string lights across the roads (with all the cars blocked off), the decorative silver snowflake lights across every intersection leading you to the markets like a yellow brick road, the blue street lights and the stalls and lights in the market itself. It provided a hazy glow, and if I had better circulation (or gloves, honestly) to ignore the miserable, wet achiness of the weather, I might even describe it as magical.
Three: there were a truly stupid number of Christmas trees placed throughout the market. You couldn’t walk ten feet without running into another one, but there were two that stood out. Literally, I mean. They towered over the rest, tall enough that, in the dark, it looked like they were as tall as the multi-storied buildings bracketing the large quad. It’s one thing to look up into the vast expanse of the night sky and feel small, and another thing entirely to be dwarfed by trees that stretch to the sky, melting into the darkness, surrounded on all sides by crowds.
Sunday
Unfortunately, school waits for no one, and we had classes Monday and weekend homework we needed to complete on the train. We jetted out of Blankenberge the next morning around ten thirty, after an early morning of reviewing each others’ essays and only a few tears. We wanted to return to Well in time for dinner, a very reasonable goal with the six hour trip we had ahead of us. Unreasonably, the train didn’t get the memo.
Imagine the setting: we’re sitting three strong facing each other in the table chairs on the train, having boarded on time, waiting for it to start moving. The intercom sparks on with static, speaks for a few minutes in straight Dutch, and then shuts off. The other passengers—a group of six all over the age of sixty, since the teenage group of Scouts had gone to the downstairs cabin—are restless and talking loudly.
We’re confused, reasonably, because it’s hard enough to understand the speaker systems on trains in English, let alone a foreign language. A full hour later, we’ve finally cottoned on to the realization that, for whatever reason, our train had been delayed long enough to count as the next train in the schedule.
Wonderful. (I, at least, got a full hour of work in after helping a friend with her essay that morning.)
Second problem? In Brussels Nord, the main train station in the city, we got off that train and booked it to make our connection that would take us to Nijmegen where we could bus back to campus. Our connection never came. It was canceled because of, and I quote, ‘people on the track,’ which we stubbornly interpreted as not only not our problem, but also as a few idiots and a dare taken too far, rather than anything else.
School, travel, and prep to fly back to the States in two weeks had piled up, okay? There was only so much we could handle, and that was not one of them.
Sign Off
We finally made it back to campus and just bought noodles from the student store. It worked out, the markets were a complete success, but it certainly taught us to expect the unexpected. Thankfully, we had already known to plan for delays when it came to switching trains, so it wasn’t so bad, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind when planning your own travels.
I’m definitely not one to plan months in advance, scouring the internet for research, ideas, packing lists, let alone the weather, but I’m flexible enough to roll with the punches, so to say, even if the punches are the wind tunnels we had to trek through to get back to our Airbnb. Take note of your own travel style, because some of the things that happen for us this trip might not be so easy for others to deal with. Some people prefer to do that extra research to avoid the hassle. I have too much work to do the same, but to each their own!