Belgium

I visited Belgium for ten days last September and it's still a strong contender for being my favourite country. It was my first Workaway experience, the first country I explored on my own and the first real adventure of my gap year.

I stayed near Ypres, not far from Lille, on a small hobby farm. When I booked the location I failed to realise that, although only ten minutes from the French border, this is the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. I assumed that, like Switzerland, the half of Belgium running along the French border would be French-speaking and the half next to the Dutch and German border would be Flemish. But no. The north of Belgium is Flemish and the south is French. Probably should have checked that first! It didn't matter too much because my hosts spoke pretty good English, as did most people working in service industries, but I felt very helpless not even knowing how to say "hello" or "thank you" in the local language.

I wanted to go to Belgium because in my last year of school I wrote an extended essay on Belgium's role in the first world war. I did a lot of research on the country, read a lot of books about it and I wanted to tie it all together by actually visiting and seeing some of the battle grounds and the places I'd studied. I was happy to be staying close to Ypres (or Ieper in Flemish) which is surrounded by historic battlefields and war monuments.

I got to Belgium by taking the Eurostar from Kent to Lille as I happened to be in Kent the week before. It's the same line that goes to Disneyland Paris so it's also called the Disney express and the train was mostly filled with pre-school children wearing Mickey Mouse ears. It was noisy but amazingly fast. It's a one hour journey in total - one minute I was looking out of the window at England and the next we were on the other side of the English Channel speeding across the continent.

I stayed in a cute little gypsy wagon on the farm and had my own kitchen area for breakfasts. One of the lovely thing about the area was the extensive cycle network which enabled people to cycle between villages. At the weekends these paths were busy with cyclists all day long. I went on some wonderful evening rides and saw some stunning sunsets. It's a farming area so there's lots of open land and quaint villages with beautiful old churches dotted around. Though my hosts told me I was in a very hilly part of Belgium, it seemed almost flat to me so the cycling was nice and easy!

The most striking thing about the countryside though was the sheer number of war memorials. It was not possible to go from one village to the next without passing a war cemetery, a cross laden with poppies or the remains of old bunkers. Obviously many tourists come to the region to see the famous war relics and displays - the Last Post Ceremony, the Menin gate, the In Flanders Fields museum, Hill 60, Palingbeek park, etc. - and I did go to see those things, but I don't think I was expecting the war to be such a obvious part of the entire landscape.

It was really incredible to be able to see the exact locations of the front lines on both sides during the Great War and to see old bunkers that are still intact today and imagine soldiers living there for months on end. The Last Post Ceremony was wonderful to be a part of and I think it is phenomenal that Ypres continues to remember the soldiers every evening with this moving ceremony over a century after the end of the war.

Aside from cycling and visiting WW1 sites, I also took day trips to Ghent and Bruges. A great thing about Belgium is that it's pretty small and it's got an excellent public transportation network so it's very quick and easy to travel to different cities.

I really loved Ghent. It reminded me a little of Amsterdam because of the canals through the city centre. It had a lively atmosphere with live music playing from the water, boats gliding past all day long and church bells chiming. I visited Gravensteen (a medieval castle), tried my first Belgian waffle, went on a boat tour and climbed the tallest belfry in Belgium for spectacular views of the old city. Being under 19, I was able to enter many tourist attractions free of charge which made them even better!

Bruges couldn't live up to my high rating of Ghent but I still found it to be a nice city. It too has beautiful waterways, old buildings and an impressive belfry tower. I watched a diamond polishing show in Belgium's only diamond museum as well as visiting the museum of potato fries - a popular Belgian street food.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Belgium. It was a successful start to my gap year. A stunning country with so much historical interest. I would love to return in the future, perhaps pay a visit to some of the other cities such as Antwerp and Liège or maybe even to live in the French-speaking half for a while.

#belgium #ypres #ww1 #travel #gapyear #europe #culture