Visiting Belgium is always a mixed experience. On the one hand, we have friends and family living there, but, on the other, much of my past life has all but disappeared. In total, I lived in Belgium for ten years. However, today it is vastly different from that old, post-war place I once knew. Sometimes, it's hard to reconcile the two. Today's Brussels, for instance, is much more international than it used to be. There are more Europeans mostly from the East, but there are also people working for global companies that are now based close to the European institutions. There is an unbelievable amount of new construction, as well as renovations and conversions of old buildings. Sometimes I miss my old hometown, but then it's reassuring to see Brussels moving with the times, becoming the city it always deserved to be, instead of a well-kept secret.

This time, we started our Belgian visit in the southeast corner of the country, in French-speaking Wallonia. We were here to see my high school friend, Chris, and his lovely family. We met in nearby Luxembourg, where he works, and, after a few hours exploring the small city-state, we soon drove across the border to his village. After our non-stop adventures of the past few weeks, it felt wonderful to find ourselves in the middle of family bliss, playing with kids and enjoying the peace of the Belgian countryside. We walked Lucien, the Great Dane, and visited nearby towns, as well as the Bastogne War Museum. It was a different way of experiencing Belgium, as this part of the country represents an important chapter of its history and also contains the contradictions that represent its chaotic present and uncertain future.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about Belgium is its place at the center of European history and at the heart of the continent’s culture. While Belgium only became a country in 1830, the territory has existed as part of the Low Countries (the “Netherlands”) for centuries. Somehow, due to its central location, the area always found itself being used as a battleground in wars and conflicts that raged between France, Prussia and England at various times. The most famous of these battles was probably Waterloo, where I went to high school. Today, there is nothing hinting at the area’s bloody past, except for a man-made hill that my friends and I used to scale and roll down. The same is true of Bastogne and surrounding areas. While you may not have heard of the Battle of the Bulge, it was one of the deciding conflicts in World War II, when the Nazis pushed back after the D-Day landings.

The Allied Forces in the area — mostly Americans under the orders of General Patton — fought a tough and valiant battle in the forests of the Ardennes, ultimately pushing the tide of the war decidedly in favor of the Allies. Because of this last fight, the Russians reached Berlin first and managed to occupy the east of Germany. Today, Patton is buried amongst his men at the American Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg. While these places sound far from each other, the distances are negligible and history unfolded in a very small geographic region. It seemed to make sense that we should arrive here after our time in Germany, learning about the last days of the Third Reich. So much of European history is intertwined.

It’s not all about the past though. We enjoyed our time with our friends, watching films and visiting the local bowling alley, playing with the kids and unwinding as much as possible. By the time we had to leave, we didn’t want to go. Nonetheless, we drove to Brussels, where we stayed in a small Airbnb near the Porte de Halle. From this convenient base, we explored the heart of the city and spent time with family and friends. We went to familiar places, like the Grand Place, Sainte Catherine, the Old England and the Bourse, as well as places we didn’t know as well—the Sablon, Koekelberg Cathedral and Saint Gilles. We also managed to squeeze in a day trip to Gent (or Ghent), in the Dutch-speaking west of Belgium named Flanders.

Gent is another one of my distant hometowns, as I spent two years there as a child and my maternal grandmother was born in a village nearby. I always recommend Gent to friends visiting Belgium, as it’s more picturesque than Brussels and more real than Bruges. While the latter is overrun by tourists, Gent is a fully functioning town, inhabited by people living everyday lives. Bruges is beautiful, but it’s more of an illusion, like Florence. I prefer Gent, because it’s a beautifully preserved and restored medieval town, with incredible architecture and a vibrant culture. It’s also a student town, so the young people keep it humming day and night. I was moved by an unplanned visit to my old boarding school and delighted by old haunts that seemed as awe-inspiring as when I was a child, like Gravesteen Castle, the Belfry and St. Baaf’s Cathedral, home to Van Eyck’s “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” triptych. Jona enjoyed the trip as much as I did, discovering the Old Post Office building and quaint cobblestone streets by the canals. When it was time to head back to Brussels, we found ourselves wishing for more time in Gent.

There were a few nice surprises in Brussels, like the Magritte Museum and the view from Koekelberg, but we promised ourselves that we would visit new parts of Belgium on our next visit. The old Belgium of Art Nouveau and Tintin is rapidly vanishing. In its place, the authorities are building a gleaming, if somewhat unoriginal, glass city to compete with other European capitals. It’s certainly emerged from the shadow of Paris and London, becoming a travel destination in its own right, but it is also losing some of the independent spirit that I loved — the same original sense of purpose that led monks to brew intriguing beers and craft complex cheeses, or musicians to create record labels that distributed new forms of music like New Beat and Techno, and architects like Victor Horta and Ernest Blérot who designed some of the most imaginative Art Nouveau buildings. I recognize that much of this cultural richness (but not all of it) was funded by the colonial exploitation of the Congo (which the Belgians named Zaire), but I will miss the quirky nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of the city, while hoping that Brussels thrives in its latest, international iteration.