“What am I doing in Belgium?” you ask yourself. “And where are my pants?”

The answer is: Go to Bruges. It doesn’t matter how you got into the country or who has your kidneys now, the important thing is that you need to walk around Bruges at night, an experience that would charm your pants off anyway if you hadn’t already lost them. Bruges at night is why you go to Europe and deal with all the heathens and cholera in the first place.

Bruges became the capital of West Flanders when the medieval Flemish got there, looked around, and said “Okily Dokily!” Then they dug some canals and sat back and waited to laugh at the people who pronounced it “broo-gez.”

Bruges during the daytime is no slouch, a charming old city replete with medieval architecture…

Flowers…

Screaming horse heads…

Beer Souvenir Palaces...

Vegan ice cream waffles…

Comic books about the adventures of the plastic Mick Jaggers…

And whatever the hell this is…

But when the sun went down, that was when Bruges really turned on its magic.

The water in the canals in the quiet corners of the town was smooth as glass, creating beautiful and eerie reflections of the buildings along the canal sides.

I was fascinated by how the reflection of this bridge appeared to create a giant eye, like a portal into the netherworld.

The shops in the center of Bruges contained countless strange offerings.

Belgium makes many, many things out of chocolate. Most of them horrifying.

Who asked for chocolate tits? Nobody? That didn’t stop Belgium. Not for one second.

Bruges even had, I guess, their version of those Slow Children signs we put up to warn motorists that the kids in this neighborhood are, seriously, dumb as rocks, watch out before they chew the paint off your car.

I had much of Bruges to myself as I wandered through the night. Or at least I thought I did, until I saw the swans.

These two swans drifted silently through the dark night, as I followed them through the city along the canal and occasionally photographed their romantic moonlight swim.

Wow, that was made-to-order travel magic. Thanks Bruges.

One of my favorite features of the town was this statue of the Virgin Mary playing The Star Spangled Banner on electric guitar.

I’d been wandering through Bruges for hours, seemingly to every nook and cranny, but I still hadn’t seen the most famous sight in the city. Every photo I’d ever seen of Bruges was of one particular building lit up at night and reflected in the canal. How had I not seen this? I’d been everywhere! I pulled up some blogs on Bruges and attempted to follow their directions to the money shot of Bruges. This didn’t help at all, and I spent a solid hour wandering around and not finding this famous view.

At one point I was scratching my head when a French couple asked me in halting French if I would take a photo of them. I obliged, and as I took their phone I realized the famous building was behind them, across the canal. Oh!

I handed them their iPhone back and turned around, then burst out laughing.

I was standing in front of my hotel. I’d booked this bed & breakfast on the advice of a friend who’d stayed here before. When I’d got into town I had just tossed my bag on my bed before I headed out to see the city, and I hadn’t been back all day. The view out of my bedroom window was literally the building I had been looking for all night.

Thanks Bruges.

I had only just stepped off the train into Brussels when I spotted a chocolate shop near the station that was advertising vegan chocolates. Hmmm.

I waltzed in and it was one of those joints that sells boxes of fancy-assed assortments of little chocolates with surprises in the middle, like caramel or Sarin gas. It was like See’s candy, only not so white trash. Ah, okay this is the kind of thing you buy your girlfriend for Valentine’s Day or your wife if you cheated on her. I heard about this in Forrest Gump. Holy crap, they make vegan adultery chocolates??

The nice girl behind the counter was chatting me up as I half listened and picked out chocolates to fill my box. I don’t know what the hell Tom Hanks was talking about, I know exactly what I’m going to get.

“Where are you from?”

“Uhm... CANADA!”

I was still riding the Canada ruse at this point in the trip.

“Oh that’s great! My whole family lives in Canada! Where are you located?

FUUUCK.

After I’d picked out my nine expensive chocolates, the girl closed the box, tied a ribbon around it, and then proceeded to begin wrapping it in a complex and sequential series of shiny, fancy papers and tissues before it arrived in its final destination, a huge and expensive-looking gift bag.

“Oh, no- you don’t need to do that-”

“Oh it’s no bother, this will make a wonderful gift-”

“No, I really don’t need you to wrap it at all-”

“There’s no charge, this will look lovely-”

“Look that's fine lady but I'm gonna eat these in the parking lot.”

Chocolate that is somehow fancy because they didn’t bother to label the fillings secured, I proceeded on to the only reason anyone goes to Belgium: To see the pissing baby.

Manneken Pis is a small bronze statue of a naked boy pissing into a fountain and the Belgians love it more than life itself. It originated as a stone statue in the 1400s that provided the city with drinking water, before being replaced with the famous bronze version in the 1600s. After the fountain survived an attack on the city by the French, it began to be seen as a symbol of Brussels and the resilience of the Belgian people, and the naked little boy’s fame grew.

The statue was stolen no less than seven times between the 1700s and the 1960s, the perpetrators always meeting with harsh punishments because c’mon man, let the little boy pee! The bronze statue was destroyed in a few of the thefts and had to be melted down and re-cast. After a high-profile theft that made international news in 1965, the broken statue was recovered from a canal by divers, and the Belgians decided “Enough of this shit” and put the statue in a museum, replacing it in the fountain with an exact replica.

The Belgians have many legends about the origin of the statue, most of them involving a little boy pissing at an opportune time, either on the enemy troops in a gesture that turned the tides of war, or on the fuse of explosives that were planted to destroy Brussels. Look- just accept that they’re somehow very attached to this pissing kid and I was here to see what the fuss was all about.

“Welcome to Brussels, sir, may I interest you in-”

“TAKE ME TO YOUR PISSING BABIES.”

“-uh, sure sir, but Belgium has more-”

“YOU CAN’T KEEP YOUR WHIZZING INFANTS HIDDEN FROM ME FOREVER BELGIUM”

The biggest challenge in finding Manneken Pis is that it is really small. Like, ridiculously small. It may be the smallest very famous thing I’ve ever seen. Smaller than the Mona Lisa, for sure.

I got to the right neighborhood and wandered around, frowning that there was no sign of what had to be, at minimum, a life-sized pissing infant. I actually walked right past the fountain at least twice before I even noticed it. Oh, THAT?

Well okay then. That’s one small pissing baby.

My favorite thing about the site is that on the same block there is a store with a much larger pissing chocolate baby and I only found the real thing because I was laughing at the pissing chocolate baby and when I turned around -oh shit- there was the real thing.

Anyway, my favorite image from Belgium is this chocolate baby pissing on some kid.

The whole street is pissing baby-themed.

Nothing stokes my appetite like a restaurant called Pissing Baby Waffles.

But where to go now that you’ve seen the whizzing infant and your life is complete? Wait, what? There are more urinating statues? But of course there are! What do you think Brussels is, some kind of one-whiz pony? Take me to them, Belgium!

Across town and down a narrow and obscure alleyway, you will find…

Delirium? Ha ha, they have a pink elephant on their sign. That’s great.

Oh, and further down the alley you will find Jeanneke Pis a somewhat less-famous station of a naked girl popping a squat for all to see.

Jeanneke is locked behind a cage to prevent her from roaming the streets at night, whizzing on things. Seems reasonable.

Is that all? OF COURSE NOT! Belgium wouldn’t let us down like that.

On the other side of town (really, you guys could have centrally located your pissing statues for tourist convenience, though I do kind of appreciate the treasure hunt aspect of all of this) there stands… this dog?

That doesn’t seem so bad. I don’t see what the big deal is about-

Oh.

And so… last but certainly not least, Het Zinneke, the pissing dog statue.

This one was pretty hard to find, so I made sure to tell everyone I encountered in a five block radius that the pissing dog was up the block.

I decided that while I was there, I might as well see what non-pissing-related things Brussels had to offer, just in case there were any. I made my way to the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula.

Walking into the church, one droning bass note thundered through the massive stone church, reverberating forever. Wow, that’s one impressive organ!

(No, the organ didn’t pee while I was there)

(Neither did Mary.)

The organ continued its long, belching yawn of bass, like a cat had fallen asleep on the keyboard.

As I walked through the church, the rumbling bass note melted into atonal clusters of discordant notes, the sounds echoing around me like we were in deep space in an arty 1970s sci-fi movie and the shit had just hit the fan. Wow! What the hell kind of church music is this? Is this some kind of new age thing? It seems like a pretty old church, maybe this is some ancient tradition I’ve never encountered before? Maybe the ancient Belgians were really into Brian Eno or something.

BVWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA the organ responded, shaking my teeth.

After a long wander through the church, gawking at the architecture and stained glass windows, I turned around and spotted, in a shaft of light across the way, the person who was playing the organ. I laughed out loud. It was just some dude who had wandered in off the street, he had no affiliation with the church whatsoever. And apparently no training on the organ.

VWWWBRRRRRRRRRVWAAAAAAAA the organ responded to my laughter.

The centerpiece of Brussels is Grand Place, a large square hemmed in by fancy and important buildings on all sides.

The splendor was of course impressive, though I couldn’t help but temper my appreciation with the knowledge that Belgium had built most of this with the spoils of their colonization of Africa, back when they were enslaving all the natives and cutting their hands off if they didn’t help Belgium plunder the region’s natural resources fast enough. But hey! Pretty buildings!

Of course you can’t get too caught up in how ugly history tends to be when you’re traveling, or else you won’t be able to appreciate anythi-

Oh Belgium, you absolute sweetheart! All is forgiven. Candy candy candy!

What’s that? Vegan ice cream on a waffle? Well lookit who’s the best country ever!

This trip was, of course, a wonderful opportunity to improve my French, which did not actually happen at all. Between traveling full-time on an ambitious itinerary and simultaneously working full time on the go, I was lucky if I had time to stuff food in my face and occasionally pass out for a few hours. French immersion was not a realistic option. My main goal for my time in France was just to get out of the country without starting a fistfight by saying the wrong thing in French. It was a relief to cross the border into Germany, since I had absolutely no hope of speaking German (or Dutch after that in The Netherlands) so there was no real pressure on me language-wise.

Then, of course, I got to Belgium and everyone was speaking French. Goddammit. Belgium has two distinct regions, a Flemish region that speaks Dutch and a region that speaks French. In-between is Brussels, where officially both languages are spoken, but in reality everyone only speaks French there.

Then I got to Switzerland and everyone was speaking French there, too. Goddammit.

Brussels also had a bunch of other shit I couldn’t think of Jean-Claude Van Damme jokes about.

Dammit Sweden! What did I tell you about your horse dude statues? Oh... Belgium? Okay fine, you get one pass.

All right you assholes, don't make me come down there.

Ghent is another medieval city, this one the capital of East Flanders. I regret to inform you that the only thing I remember about Ghent is that it was hot AF. But that’s its own kind of review, I suppose. Enjoy some photos.

"This store smells weird."

"Honey? Did you forget to feed the giraffe?"

"Look, for the last time, we sell ONE thing here."

"Can I get some french fries?"

"NO."

Belgium loves puns more than you love your mom.

Well, this is what I get for watching The Ring and that cursed Hanson video at the same time.

Yes, you have Belgium to blame for the fact that you know what Smurfs are.

Antwerp is the second-largest city in Belgium, and their train station is completely amazeballs.

All in all Antwerp felt noisier and more chaotic than the other places I visited in Belgium, though that may have had something to do with me spending the night on the poorer side of town. This in itself was interesting though, seeing the mix of immigrants from all over the world, compared to the relatively homogenous Netherlands next door.

Either way it was lovely lovely lovely to walk around at night.

What kind of cruel bastard keeps his bird inside an egg beater?

Goodnight Belgium. Sleep well. Dream not of horrifying chocolate nor pissing children.