After a night in a tiny AirBnB in
Canterbury, where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later.
Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.
In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place called Maison L just as it opened, ordered tentatively, and when the food arrived, realised we'd hit the jackpot. It was delicious.
Next day it rained. This was such a novelty after the weeks of drought that we didn't really mind, although we did have to buy Theo a jacket. This meant our first experience of Lille included Decathlon, H&M and Primark. After that we became proper tourists and went to admire the Grand Place, which is surrounded by large red and white buildings. We walked through streets stuffed with shops and cafes, felt far too underdressed to go into a particularly posh and old-fashioned bakery called Méert, visited the Église Saint Maurice, which is historic and Gothic and has an amazingly delicate spire, and finally reached the cathedral.
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| Grand Place in the rain |
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| La Vieille Bourse in the Grand Place |
Lille Cathedral, or the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de la Treille, tries to look Gothic but is mostly twentieth-century. By the time they got to the west front they'd given up on the Gothic idea and finished it off with a vast translucent wall and a modernist rose window instead. Notre Dame de la Treille appears to translate as Our Lady of the Trellis - her statue features a small lattice gate - although it may also refer to an ancient district of Lille. Either way, this particular representation of Mary has a long history of devotion in the city.
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| west front exterior |
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| west front interior |
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| looking towards the east |
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| looking west |
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| Chapel of Notre Dame de la Treille |
We admired Lille Cathedral for longer than we intended, since the persistent drizzle had suddenly turned into a downpour. After a while we decided it really wasn't going to ease off. We made a very wet dash for the train station to catch the Metro back to our apartment, where we made good use of the tumble drier.
Next day the sun shone and we went to Brussels.
Brussels was busy. The roads were full of traffic and trams, the streets and squares were packed with people. We walked through the Place Royale, where the buildings were large and white and solid; across the Parc de Bruxelles, which finished with a fountain and a rainbow zebra crossing; and into the Grand Place, which was surrounded by fancy architecture featuring huge numbers of windows.
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| Place Royale |
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| fountain in the park |
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| decorated streets |
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| Hotel de Ville |
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| Grand Place |
The Cathédrale Saints-Michel-et-Gudule was crowded as well. I'd rarely seen a church with so many people in when there wasn't a special event happening. We did a quick tour, admiring the vaulted roof and stained glass, and slightly perplexed by the elaborately carved Pulpit of Truth.
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| Pulpit of Truth |
We bought chocolate and stroopwafel, because you have to in Belgium, don't you? And we went to see the Manneken Pis, the fountain with the little boy having a wee. It is much like the Mona Lisa: smaller than you expect, surrounded by other people's heads, and only an attraction because everyone goes to see it.
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| crowds round the Manneken Pis |
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| well, there you go |
It had been an exhilarating two hours in Brussels. Next stop was somewhere that promised even more thrills - the Aventure Parc in the nearby town of Wavre. We arrived to find that we were not an hour late, as we thought, but a week early - I'd booked for the wrong day. They were lovely about it and let us in anyway.
The Aventure Parc provided 29 parcours d'accrobranche, which are high ropes courses strung between tall pines. We got kitted out with harnesses, climbing suits, and gloves and set off into the trees (Graham sensibly stayed on the ground). The routes are designed so that you slide a pulley onto a cable at the start, and stay attached until you are safely back on the ground at the end. It's impossible to fall off - but equally impossible to change your mind halfway through a course!
Toby and Theo had done Go Ape courses before, so they were very familiar with it. Toby was in his element, progressing rapidly through the easy green routes and the somewhat harder red courses before completing all the downright insane black routes. Theo kindly looked after his ageing mother on the easier courses - we stayed well away from the black ones - and we leapt across swinging logs, balanced on cables, launched onto zipwires, and slid through tunnels.
Our last stop for the day was a quick visit to Graham's friend Sandeep and his family. They had not seen each other for twenty years, so we packed in a lot of introductions and catching up, followed by many promises to come back soon - or at least in less than twenty years' time!
On our final day in Lille, we walked around the star-shaped Citadelle, its fortified walls now surrounded by a park and a duckweedy moat. A bridge over the canal took us into the old town, where we treated ourselves to merveilleux - soft little meringue puffs filled with cream and coated with flecks of chocolate. We sat on a bench in a square and watched the world go by for a while.
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| there's water under there |
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| in the old town |
In the evening we went up to the top of the Grand Hôtel Bellevue to watch the sun go down. The belfry on the Chamber of Commerce, with its gold-rimmed clock faces, dominated the view; the lighted facade of the Opera House was next to it, and the many dormer windows of La Vieille Bourse - the old stock exchange - were just in front.
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| Chamber of Commerce |
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| Opera House |
Lille felt pleasantly laid-back for a large city. Cars are mostly banished to the suburbs, while wide cycle lanes run down each side of the street, and flocks of hire bikes gather at the intersections. We rode on two of the three lines of the modern metro system underneath the city, and enjoyed the lack of jostling crowds at street level.
There is, however, a large homeless population in Lille - we saw a lot of tents hidden in some woodland, and one particularly desperate woman crying, "S'il vous plait!" at a metro station. As in so many places, services for those who are destitute have been cut back to the minimum, and housing is in short supply. We were holidaying on a tight budget this year, but were reminded that we are still more fortunate than so many others.
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