Reasons to love Belgium

A tribute to Europe's most underrated country!

All the reasons I’ll always love this big-little country.

1. Chocolate

Belgian chocolate really is something special. It's considered as the gourmet standard by which other chocolate confectionaries are judged. Even the Swiss, known for their own high quality chocolate, imported the basic recipe from French and Belgian chocolatiers.

2. Castles. So. Many. Castles

Belgium also holds the record for the country with the most castles per square kilometre.

3. Snow

Being that I come from a country that is hot majority of the year, I never got the opportunity to experience snow until I moved to Belgium. Although it doesn’t snow as much as other European countries, it was always so fun and so beautiful whenever it did snow during Christmas break.

4. Geography

Belgium is one of the smaller European countries. So small in fact, that you can literally get lost on the highway and end up in a different country (true story :D) . It takes about 1 hour by train to get to France and the same time by car to go to Holland. It’s surrounded by so many great locations if you’re ever needing a change of scenery.

5. Delirium

The Delirium Café is a bar that holds the Guinness World Record for the most brews offered. You can taste more than 2004 beers from around the world. The atmosphere is incredible. It was definitely our go-to place that we'd always begin at.

6. Big city life

Now this quality is something you either love or hate. Personally I prefer the energy in a big city over residential life. Typically people in big cities are busy, on a mission and they don’t generally have time to care about the next person. It was just refreshing for me to live some place where I didn’t always feel like someone was staring at me or trying to get my number or bother me. Whereas in South Africa (*the area where I live/ not the entire SA), I feel like it’s slightly harder to go unnoticed. I can literally just be getting milk at the store and there’s always some attention I'm getting.

7. Waffles

All I’ll say is that once you’ve had Belgian waffles nothing will ever be good enough.

8. Compulsory voting

Belgium has one of the most established existing compulsory voting frameworks in Europe. If you fail to vote in at least 4 elections, you can actually lose your right to vote for 10 years.

9. Public transport

The public transport is very efficient. They have trams, trains, metros, cabs, buses & velo service (bike rental). If you’re young and can’t afford your own car or if you just don’t want to be stuck in traffic, you can always get to where you need to be.

10. There’s just no other like it really!