Looking Back: A Long Weekend in Belgium

As a birthday gift for Else last year, Ilse planned and booked a trip to Belgium. So, mid-January, we got on our train (Else's first Thalys train ride!) to Brussels. Before our trip, Else, as a dedicated dinosaur lover, found out that the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels has an impressive dinosaur collection. So: off we were to meet our friends, the dinosaurs! The collection indeed was formidable, we probably killed a photo machine (we didn't do anything wrong!), and Else tentatively tried her French skills learned on Duolingo (unintentionally rude, but well ...).

Another quick train ride away, we reached Bruges a few hours later. Ilse had booked us a fantastic hotel (even with an outside swimming pool—we hope to be back there in summer!) in the city center. During that time, we both were quite tired and exhausted and Bruges was the perfect place to relax—the city center is rather small and we could reach everything within half an hour from our hotel. Although the city is beautiful, it didn't have too many sights we had to see so that we didn't even feel the pressure of a tight sight-seeing schedule. We visited the few sights we wanted to see, but we mostly roamed Bruges without an exact destination and lazed around at cafés, bars, and restaurants, drinking wine and beer, eating fantastic meals and Belgian waffles.

We already knew that Belgium is one of the LGBTQ+ friendliest countries in the world before we started our trip: many queer people went to Belgium to get married long before Germany legalized same-sex marriages. In contrast to our trip to Portugal last year, we didn't even think about traveling as a lesbian couple. And that was perfectly okay! Not once did we feel judged, not accepted, or—and that happens almost everywhere at some point—sexualized (that might have been luck, though).

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Else & Ilse | LGBTIQ+ adventurers

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