My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. (Bruges)

The Belgian City of Bruges boasts both this picturesque, scalable belfry and a vial full of Jesus' blood that can be touched and prayed upon for 1,50 Euro.  At night, the city was mostly deserted, prompting blurry picture-taking and quiet dinnering.  Whereas Italy's beauty stems from its grandiose pulchritude's ability to overcome how everybody's been graffiting and littering on the place for centuries, Bruges was a much more intimate, clean affair, with the entire city center boasting unsullied cobblestones, small restaurants and shops that kindly offered life-shattering waffles and crepes, serene canals, and a lamp museum.

Carmen and TCS's boat trip down the canal was informative as it was fun.  While they didn't get the cool tour guide with the Ipod and Converses, their trilingual guide knew a bunch of stuff and was pretty adept at driving his boat.  One random building on the waterfront in Bruges has windows made of Viennese crystal that reflect light differently than regular windows.  How about that!

366 steps are climbed on one's way to the top of Bruges Belfry Tower.  Carmen got to see the grand-scale piano workings of the tower's bells, and views like the one shown above.  The best thing about Bruges is how modernity truly doesn't show up at all in the city center, or that the Europeanness of the place is really apparent from the onset, and the swans, too, of course.

This is a big ceramic horse dressed as a zebra in the Brussels train station.  Never, ever, go to Brussels.