Belgium is a little country with a big network of bicycle routes. Not American-style bike routes, either, that are often aspirational or just plain fictional, littered with broken glass and double-parked Fedex trucks. Belgian bike routes are for real. They're often dedicated bike paths that usher you over the top of dikes or along old canal tow paths that date to the days when canal barges were pulled by horses.
I follow one of the routes, Stedenroute LF 2A, into a town called Mechelen that has a central square full of pretty buildings that aren't nearly as old and historical as they look. Two world wars took care of the real stuff. Now Flanders is full of fakes. Not fakes like the knockoff Gucci handbags you find on Canal Street in NYC, but fakes like the prosthetic limbs of a war veteran. Fakes that fit inside the outlines of old traumas. That cover up bullet holes and bomb craters. So maybe some of these Flemish towns feel like theme parks. But it's kind of heartless to complain about it.
Leuven is next, a bustling college town with a Rathaus that looks like an enormous block of granite that got dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. Now it's covered with High Gothic crustaceans. All manner of arches and finials and shady looking statues loitering in canopied niches. On top of all that, there's a second decorative order of soot and pigeon poop. read more