En Belgique ...

 

We have just gotten back from Belgium. Steve had to give a talk in Lille, which is only about an hour away from the border, so I accompanied him and spent Friday morning at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille while he gave a math talk entirely in French. I was not allowed to attend, even though I offered to stand in the wings and cue him with vocabulary words he might tend to forget under stress.  (I am always trying to think up reasons why he ought to let me attend one of his talks.  It never works.)

Then we took the train an hour and a half north to Bruges, where we dragged our suitcase over a mile of cobblestones and permanently screwed up its wheels. Bruges is so picturesque -- the whole thing, not just the historic center -- that words fail me. Here are some pictures. (Yes, my card reader and my computer are inexplicably speaking to each other again! )

We stayed in a great hotel within walking distance of everything, in a huge blue room on the third floor overlooking the garden.  In the morning, all you heard was birdsong outside the window. 

The evening we arrived, we marveled at the canals...

And the crooked buildings...

 

Swans nesting ...

And the palaces that look as though Walt Disney might have gotten his inspiration here.

Most interesting: the Beguinage of Bruges. Beguines were women of the Middle Ages who, largely deprived of men who were being killed off by wars and crusades, started banding together into loose communities to provide themselves with protection, sustenance, and purpose.  These women were highly religious but bound themselves by no vows -- they could leave the community at any time, marry if they so chose.  They could own property, and some even had children.  They wore habits that looked like that of a nun, and they devoted themselves to care of the sick and the poor.  They lived by their own labor, though in later years some of the communities turned to begging and became centers of mysticism.  As you can imagine, this did not sit very well with the Catholic Church, which accused them of heresy and had pretty much stamped them out by the end of the 18th century, though a few persisted even into the 20th. 

There are no more Beguines alive today.  The Beguinage in Bruges is home now to a Benedictine order of nuns, but the grounds, church, and a museum remain open to the public, as do many others throughout the Low Countries: