Last week I visited Bruges for the third time.
That might sound like a lot of visits to a relatively small Belgian city, especially when my travel list is long. Still, sometimes a place keeps drawing you back. For me, Bruges is one of those places.
My first visit was in primary school when my family took an organised coach trip to Bruges and Ghent. The journey was memorable for awkward reasons — a distressing incident on the coach — and as a child I didn’t appreciate the trip beyond vague impressions and the comfort of familiar distractions. I remember little of that weekend now.
Years later in high school, we visited again during a weekend trip to Brussels to see my sister, who was living and working there. I felt grown-up staying with her in her shared house, but once more Bruges didn’t leave a lasting impression; it blended into other travel memories from that time.
