Bruges: Back to the Future?

There probably aren’t too many places left in the world like Bruges. Located in Western Flanders, in the northwest of Belgium, Bruges is probably the best-preserved medieval city left in Europe. It’s a classic storybook town, drawn straight out of romance movies and children’s books, the kind of place you’d never imagine a city bus snorting through.

Yet here I am waiting for the bus. The roads here are too small to be anything but one-way, and the road in front of my destination, the hostel where I’m staying, goes the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up.

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Oh, Just Horsing Around

It’s practically a law of the Earth: the corner bakery will have croissants. The tides will roll in and out, the seasons will change, and the corner bakery will have croissants.

And so it was that on a particular Sunday, my corner bakery did not, actually, have croissants. Or pain au chocolat or much of anything else, except for apple turnovers. And I was not in the mood for apple turnovers. Being out of cereal and bread, if I was going to eat anything that morning, I was going to have to find it first. I would be meeting a friend at the Centre Pompidou, way downtown, at two. Mission: breakfast.

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Paris Gets Sassy

Dmitri, a small man with a Russian accent as thick as the three or four red sweatshirts he was wearing, led me out a door and into a walled-in courtyard. He gestured at four plastic drums, each one about the size of two ATMs back-to-back, each one coloured in a ridiculously peppy shade of recycling-bin green.

“This,” he said, “is where we collect rainwater to use for our toilets.”

I nodded slowly.

This was a new one. In my admittedly short life, I’ve seen quite a few apartments. Exactly zero of them had toilet systems based off vats of rainwater.

Dmitri gestured to somewhere behind me. “Now, if you like, I’ll show you your room,” he said.

I nodded vacantly; my brain was still on the rainwater toilets. The implications of that system started to wash over me. It isn’t that that fact would make a difference when actually using a toilet – but what did it say about Dmitri? Was he some kind of eco-freak? Or just conscientious?

Regardless of which of the two was the case, he was now looking at me rather oddly.

“Your room is behind you,” he said.

I turned quickly; Dmitri led me into the diffusely lit enclosure via a flap of thick translucent plastic. The room, if it could be called that, was small and spare. To the right was a white mattress on what looked like exactly one half of an Ikea bedframe. To the left was a white desk with a depressed old folding chair tucked underneath. A space heater sat dejected in the middle of the room. The ceiling was made of corrugated metal on wooden slats: the kind of construction most often seen in Discovery Channel documentaries about Kenya.

“So this would be your room,” he said. “This is what we like to call the Writers’ Studio.”

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Rotaries, For Fun and Profit

Place Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, at 10:30 p.m. on a rainy Monday.

Exit 135 off New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway is not generally regarded as a very revolutionary structure. It’s a normal suburban freeway interchange, constructed near the middle of the twentieth century, which connects the Parkway to various nearby towns through roads that point outward like the lines in a peace sign. If raw function were the only criteria for judging a road structure, exit 135 would hardly deserve any more notice than, say, yet another pothole on the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel.

But Exit 135 is unique for one reason alone: unlike most interchanges on North America, Exit 135 is a rotary. A roundabout. A circus. Whatever you prefer to call it, it’s a roadway structure almost never seen in North America, and yet central to urban forms elsewhere in the world.

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