Bruges is no longer Erasmus
Sometimes stopping is the only way to understand. It is the premise (easy approach, extremely difficult execution) of that way of seeing life called slow life and that has in Bruges an annual festival that celebrates, precisely, deceleration and slow time; that vindicates what is important in the face of this day-to-day nonsense around what is urgent.
Is named SLOW (36h, the slower the experience, the more intense the memory’) and intends something as simple as that: thirty-six hours where you can stop and pause, listen to Sufi chants, walk slowly through the city —how different a city is when you look at it leisurely—, shudder at the universe of Terrence Malick or Sigur Ros and cook organic dishes around a completely local pantry.
This is precisely how the slow movement was born by the hand of Carlo Petrini: it was the day they planted a Mcdonalds in the Plaza de España, in the eternal città, Rome.
Sometimes stopping is the only way to understand
Like a rejection before the roller of the inevitable and from there to the _ slow travel _ and this festival that is also a beautiful symbol of what is happening in Bruges, that beautiful 'university' city that we have inevitably associated with those first trips through Europe; to the Erasmus aesthetic, the backpacks in the train car and the lightning that is that transit between adolescence and maturity.
Bruges, Prague, Lisbon or Bologna, we all wanted to be a little Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in that masterpiece called Before Sunrise and meeting again six months later at the Vienna train station; I also made that promise in another scenario. But I never came back.
We all wanted to be a little Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise
“That life was serious / one begins to understand later —Like all young people, I came / to take my life ahead of me”; nobody like Gil de Biedma to translate our melancholy of what was and what we were, that's why I always understood that it was impossible to dissociate a destination from nostalgia: you can't.
What can be done is return with different eyes to those places where you were another me, a 'me' perhaps not so anguished by the rush and the balm of the little while in front of Netflix, a 'me' capable of getting excited in every street and before every little adventure: that's traveling.
So maybe it's time to return to Bruges and (re) discover a fascinating and cosmopolitan city; a piece of history in stone where craftsmanship and a look towards culture color every corner of every street.
Who does not remember the backpacks in the train car and the nights in the airports?
The medieval cobblestones of the historic center (which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage), the winding canals, the green walls and an endless number of shops where love reigns for what is well done.
This handful of shopkeepers —what a beautiful profession— and artisans have been called #LocalLove: since Natalie's calligraphy (and her cat her Namasté) in Simbolik a handmade hats at Baeckelandt , since the millions of books in Boekhandel De Reyghere to the design of each piece in Gouts et Couleurs.
The medieval cobblestone of Bruges
Art is still present, because it never left, among the halls of Groeninge or each of the galleries and antique shops that run through this set full of canals in that other wonderful movie: Hiding in Bruges.
And hedonism, of course; because today I don't intend to surrender to clichés (neither mossels, chips nor chocolate) today it's time to enjoy the talent of Patrick Devos and 'his green haute cuisine' which shows that healthy can also, and should! be exciting, **from the creativity of Dries Cracco and Tomas Puype at Franco Belge** (perhaps the fittest gastronomic in Bruges) to the stratospheric product at the Deldycke bar.
Eat, drink and live where you were happy; not a bad plan, right?
The art is still there, because it never left