Bruges' sights are similar to those of Ghent, except that its belfry is more splendid and more famous and the Memlings of the Hôpital St. Jean draw crowds of art lovers to Bruges who never even stop at Ghent.
Our little run around Belgium, a sort of willy-nilly blowing about by the North Sea winds, drew us next to Ostende. If there is one place more splendidly chic than Ostende it is Monte Carlo. The palm is still with Monte Carlo, but, for August at any rate, Ostende, with its Digue, its hotels and terrace cafés and restaurants, is the very glass of fashion and fashionables.
It was only on entering Ostende, over the last few kilometres of the road from Bruges, just where it borders the Slykens Canal, that we met anything deserving to be called a good road since leaving the neighbourhood of Namur. The roads of Belgium served a former generation very well, but tempus fugit, and the world advances, and really Belgium's highways are a disgrace to the country.
The chief attraction of Ostende—after the great hotels—is its Digue, or Dyke, a great longdrawn-out breakwater against whose cemented walls pound the furies of the North Sea with such a virulence and force as to make one seasick even on land. "See our Digue and die," say the fisherfolk of Ostende,—those that have not been crowded out by the palace hotels,—"See our Digue and eat our oysters."
Ostende is attractive, save on the August bank holiday, when the trippers come from London; then it looks like Margate or Southend so far as its crowds are concerned, and accordingly is frightful.
One should not leave Belgium without visiting Ypres, that is if he wants to know what a highly respectable and thriving small city of Belgium is like.
Ypres is typical of the best, though unfortunately, by whichever road you approach, you still make your way over granite blocks, none too well laid or cared for. The best and almost only way to avoid them is to take to the by-roads and trust to finding your way about. This is not difficult with the excellent map of the Automobile Club de Belgique, but it requires some ingenuity to understand the native who answers your inquiry in bad French and worse Walloon or Flemish.
At Ypres the Hôtel de la Chatellenie will care for you and your automobile very well, though its garage is nothing to boast of. Both meals and beds are good, and the rates are cheap, something less than nine francs a day for birds of passage. You must pay extra for wine, but beer is thrown in, thick, sticky, sugary beer, but it's better than England's "bitter," or the lager of Rotterdam.
Ypres is full of interesting buildings, but its Hôtel de Ville and its Cloth Hall, with its lacelike façade, are easily the best. Ypres has a museum which, like most provincial museums, has some good things and some bad ones, a stuffed elephant, some few good pictures, sea-shells, the instruments which beheaded the Comte d'Egmont, and some wooden sculptures; variety enough to suit the most catholic tastes.