Belgium

Our Beligian adventure was only meant to include Bruges, but owing to some confusion at a train station in Brussels, we managed to see a fair bit of the country en route. My in-depth observations from an afternoon of meandering: the country is flat, bicycles are prevalent, and it's easy to find your way again if you're prepared to spend some time waiting at a deserted rural train station that smells of blood and bone.

Bruges was full of two groups of people that didn't look much like us: aged pensioners, and school kids with their note books at the ready (back in my day, we did history the hard way - with chalk, illustrated textbooks and anonymous spit-balls).

The sheer quantity of people around made it nearly impossible to see anything touristy without being bumped into by pimply-faced teenagers eating frites or those motorised old-timer mobiles, so I found myself wandering the back streets and parks, such as the above, a fair bit. We took a boat ride down the canals and ate chocolates and drank beer, and put up with the German socks-and-sandles brigade we were sharing the B&B with. It was nice.