Oui Love France

Christmas and Gingerbread houses in Brussels

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These Christmassy photos from a December trip to Belgium originally featured on Maison Cupcake. 

The great thing about a weekend getaway to Brussels is that the hotels are such good value.

As the centre of the European Parliament, the hotels are expensive during the week when all the bureaucrats are about. Come Saturday night they’ve all gone home and the hotels are selling off their rooms very cheaply.

That’s not to say Brussels isn’t a place for tourists, December especially sees the streets surrounding the Grand Place filled with atmospheric Christmas Markets.

You can get a very good four star hotel room in the centre of Brussels for under £100 per night including breakfast, we booked Hotel Windsor using lastminute.com. We had driven from the UK and parked overnight in an underground car park near the Grand Place for around 12 euros.

This was 4 years ago now but I have been researching trips to Belgium more recently and know this hotel at weekend would be phenomenally good value even now. Bruges on the other hand, is very pricey, very difficult to book at weekends near Christmas since its proximity to Calais makes it very busy for “booze cruisers”.

Brussels is worth the extra hour’s drive. We were able to leave Brussels at around 4pm on Sunday and using Eurotunnel still be home for a reasonable 9pm and not be too tired for work the following day.

In the hotel lobby, we were captivated by this village of gingerbread houses. I vowed to make one myself but to this day have not yet managed to do so.

Aren’t they gorgeous?

The lobby was filled with smell of gingerbread, it was so welcoming. I think these are the best gingerbread houses I have ever seen.

As a food blogger, taking this many pictures would be normal but this was a long time before so that gives you an idea what an impression they made on me!

January in Ghent, Belgium

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This post originally featured on Maison Cupcake.

This weekend’s Saturday Postcard comes from Ghent in Belgium, one of the larger towns in the Flemish part of the country.
On a weekend trip on the Eurostar we were visiting a former college friend living in Waterloo, some 30 minutes south of Brussels.
My first trip to Belgium had been a work trip to the European Parliament, fascinating by day but deathly dull when spending time with my colleagues in the evening. It was good to go back to Belgium for fun.  I always imagined Belgium to be the same as France but it has a style all of it’s own and is more like how I’d imagine Holland to be.

Ghent is famous for it’s architecture and canals.  It was a bright day in January and the sun was very low in the sky making photos difficult.  I took these pictures long before my days as a blogger so they are very different to what I might try to capture now.

The canal was so still you could see the buildings almost reflected perfectly in the water.  Everyone seemed to be on bikes.

Looking up, there were lots of pretty shutters and windows.  We drank Kriek (Cherry Beer) in a bar and ate crepes with chocolate sauce in a cafe.

If you are visiting Belgium, I would recommend a daytrip to Ghent. I’ve not been to Bruges but heard that it is incredibly crowded.  Ghent is a quieter alternative but still has plenty to look at.

One thing confused us though.  All the shops still had Christmas displays and in the streets the trees and decorations were still up.  Didn’t anyone tell them it was mid January?!