Review of Traveling through the Netherlands and Belgium

Bruges Canal

Traveling through the Netherlands and Belgium was fun and there are a lot more places to stay, things to do and fabulous restaurants. I’m thinking that I may have to make a return trip, soon. For information about my rating system, see Reading the Reviews.

Staying in the B&B: Brussels and Bruges

Everyone rides the train in Europe and few understand that folks from the US are mostly

Live news report

clueless about how to use this sort of transportation. So with the help of a few kindhearted souls we made our way from Maastricht to the interesting city of Brussels.  Being near the border of France, the city is officially bilingual; and English is very common, as well since there are so many tourists. Historically a Dutch-speaking city, Brussels has seen a major shift to French since Belgian independence in 1830. Founded by a descendant of Charlemagne in the, 10^th century Brussels has grown from a fortress town to a fair-sized city and, in effect, the capital of the European Union (EU) as well as headquarters for NATO. While we were there, a great debate was occurring about whether Greece was going to adopt the austerity measures set out by the EU or whether they were going to go ahead as usual.