Another record breaking summer in the Low Lands, this time for all the wrong reasons. It was mentioned on the news that it’s been the coldest summer on record. Can you believe it, mid July and i’m walking around wrapped up in a scarf! Being optimistic I decided to go for a drive yesterday, this time heading south. I ended up in that thin strip of land crushed in between Germany and Belgium which the Dutch call Limburg. It’s actually a really pretty part of the Netherlands with the Dutch Alps, i.e. rolling hills to you and me.
While I was passing through Limburg it started to rain so I decided not to stop driving until it was dry. I got to a T junction, turn left and in a couple of minutes you enter Germany, turn right and you enter Belgium. I remembered vaguely being in this region away back as a teenager with my European Interrail pass and had visited Aachen (D) and the Ruhr Valley so decided to turn right.
The first stop in Belgium was for petrol (ALOT cheaper than Holland) and some coffee. I was speaking in Dutch but couldn’t understand a word the Belgians were saying in their dialect. I decided to keep driving, the landscape changed into miles and miles of Belgian villages, all brickwork and delapidation. Have you ever been in Belgium? It borders of depressing even on the sunniest of days but i’ve learned to look at Belgium in comparison to slick-and-modern over-regimented Holland and can see the charm in the brick houses and road directions, some of them downright dangerous.
I decided to give up on my no-stopping rule, due to starvation and was in the area of Brussels. Look on a map and you’ll see I crossed (almost) the whole country – in an hour! I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been to Brussels so opted very randomly for Mechelen, slightly in the direction of Antwerp.
First thoughts on Mechelen….pretty, slightly ghetto, delapidated, ghost town (but this was due to the storm I think). Places that don’t have modern high-rise suburbs are a major plus for me and Mechelen didn’t have any. It wasn’t as beautiful as Bruges and lacked the sophistication of Brussels but it was way better than tense Antwerp.
I went to a cafe, ate and drank coffee for ages while looking onto a deserted square waiting for the rain to stop. The people of Mechelen are nicknamed the “Moon Extinguishers” by the people of Belgium. One night in the 17th Century the moon was reflected in the windows of the tower of the church (in the photo above). The people of Mechelen started to climb the tower with buckets of water to save their precious church from what they thought was a fire and hence the nickname. The deeper you delve into what it means to be Belgian the more you will discover odd stories like this.
So, my Saturday in Mechelen, by now horizontal rain and discarded bits of metal and fabric that used to be umbrellas. I took a few photos of some buildings:
The offices of Vlaams Belang, the political party which wants the northern Dutch speaking part of Belgium to seperate from the French speaking south (Wallonie).
By now it was bordering on gale force so I decided to seek shelter in the church but to no avail – it was closed. I stood in a doorway of the church until the worst of the rain was over. Nearby was a couple of statues which I thought worthy of a photo before the drive back home.



























































