Dorling Kindersley "Brussels"

Dorling Kindersley (Hewetson, Zöe) "Brussels. Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp" - 2000
A Dorling Kindersley Travel Guide

One of the DK Travel Guides I have used frequently. Brussels is my favourite city. I have lived there. I have met my husband there. We have been going more than once every year since we moved away and now our youngest son lives there, right in the area where my husband and I met.

I love the Eyewitness Guides and also their little sister, The Travel Guides. Even if you are not able to visit a city (or a country), you can see exactly what it looks like and get a lot of information about the town, the people, the buildings, the parks, the museums, the food, just about everything you would like to know about a certain place.

The guide is divided into the areas of the city: the Lower Town, the Upper Town, Greater Brussels, Beyond Brussels, it gives you all the information a traveller needs: Where to stay, restaurants, cafés and bars, Shopping in Brussels, there is a survival guide with practical and travel information, everything you need to know.

Brussels is such a beautiful city with so many historic places, it's hard to know where to begin. A must is definitely the Grand Place with all its picturesque guild houses. You certainly can't miss this. It's beautiful to sit in one of the restaurants and observe the bustling life around you. But we usually just have a coffee there and go for dinner in one of the cheaper places just off the market or in another quarter, the food is so much better, as well.

In every even year, there is a flower carpet on the Grand Place, always around Assumption Day (of Mary, 15 August), a national holiday in Belgium.

One place we visit almost every time is the Cinquantenaire which is close by my old living place. There's a beautiful parc and a palace built by Leopold II on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary (cinquantenaire) of Belgium. Him being German, he based the memorial arcade on the Brandenburg Gate but it also looks like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Then there's the Quartier Royal with its Royal Palace and the Parc de Bruxelles, one of the most beautiful parcs you can imagine. And, of course, lots of wonderful museums for anyone interested in art and history. The palace is open to the public in the summer. Definitely worth another visit.

And there are places you should visit, if you happen to be in Brussels for longer or at a certain time. First of all, the symbol of Brussels, the Atomium, originally constructed as the centrepiece of the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58). Definitely worth it, especially since its renovation about two decades ago. Six of the spheres are accessible to the public and they show permanent as well as temporary exhibitions on the 50s, the Expo, the construction as well as modern art or anything of current interest.

Then there are the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken which are open to the public once a year for two weeks in April/May.

You can also do tours around Brussels to admire the Art Nouveau houses, doors, windows, entrances (you can get a cheap map at the info centre at the Grand Place). There is also such a map for all the comic related street art. Tintin and his friends are all over the place. And if you arrive at the Gare Central (central station) and leave the place, don't forget to look up when you pass under the passage of the Putterie.

Brussels also has beautiful metro stations, a ride on the metro is always interesting.

There is so much more to see that it is impossible to write in just one post. You will have to go and see for yourself why I love this town so much.

Of course, all the other cities mentioned in the title and the book are also very much worth visiting.

Book description:

"Highlights Lower Town, Upper Town, Greater Brussels, as well as sited beyond the city.

Recognized the world over by frequent flyers and armchair travelers alike, Eyewitness Travel Guides are the most colorful and comprehensive guides on the market. With beautiful commissioned photographs and spectacular 3-D aerial views revealing the charm of each destination, these amazing travel guides show what others only tell.

'DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Brussels, Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp' is your indispensable guide to this beautiful part of the world. The fully updated guide includes unique cutaways, floor plans and reconstructions of the must-see sights, plus street-by-street maps. The also is packed with photographs and illustrations leading you straight to the best attractions these cities offer.

With insider tips and essential local information, this uniquely visual DK Eyewitness Travel guide highlights everything you'll need to know to make your vacation special, from local festivals and markets to day trips around the countryside. Detailed listings will guide you to the best hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops for all budgets, while practical information will help you to get around by train, bus, or car.

'DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Brussels, Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp' will help you effortlessly explore every corner of Brussels, Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp."

Paris in July - Maps

Since we are virtually visiting Paris this month, I've been trying to think about where I would go first. Of course, the Eiffel Tower is one of the first places I could think about (even though it is also closed at the moment due to Corona). But to make better plans where to go on certain days and to see what is in the area, we all need maps. And, for my next visit to this wonderful city, I have put together a list of sites where you can download them for free:

Google
Introducing Paris
Mapz
Paris City Vision
Planative

So, happy travelling, at least in your mind.

More ideas, watch this space and Paris in July.

P.S. The card was made by me, that's one of my other hobbies.

Eyewitness Guide Paris

Eyewitness Guide Paris
Top 10 Paris (DK Eyewitness Travel Guides)

It's Paris in July month. Since we can't travel there in real life, we travel online.

What do we need for any trip? That's right, a map and a guide book. So, that's where I begin my month of travelling to and through Paris.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love Dorling Kindersley? Probably about a hundred times. They publish wonderful books and we have lots of them in the house and one of their Eyewitness Guide on every town and country we have visited since we discovered them about thirty years ago.

Now, with a big city like Paris, we have two choices. First, there is the big "Eyewitness Guide" (*), a beautiful book with pretty illustrations that make you believe you stand in the middle of a street and can start admiring the places already (see left picture and picture in the middle - the oldest and the newest edition). It shows so many details, gives wonderful explanations and doesn't let you miss a thing you might want to see.

It is also a brilliant non-fiction book to read, at least the first half. They give you so much information about the city itself, its history and many more interesting little tidbits. The very first edition was even advertised for "frequent flyers and armchair travelers alike".

(*) Eyewitness Guide by Alan Tillier, Anna Brooke (1993) and by DK Publishing (2020).

Top Ten
by Anna Brooke, Mike Gerrard, Donna Dailey, Paul Hines

At one point, they started the "Top 10" books. They are a lot smaller than the other ones and easy to put into your bag while walking through the city. It doesn't have the nice drawings for every single "quartier" as the original big one has but it's the best guide to the city. If you can afford it, get both, leave the large one in the hotel and take the small on your excursions. (see right picture)

From the back covers:

Eyewitness Guide:

"Discover Paris - a city synonymous with art, fashion, gastronomy, and culture.

Whether you want to be awed by iconic landmarks, lose yourself in the Louvre, or shop till you drop, your DK Eyewitness travel guide makes sure you experience all that Paris has to offer.

Paris is a treasure trove of things to see and do. Packed full of world-famous palaces, museums, and galleries, the city shines with opulence and elegance. But Parisians know that there is more to life than glitz and glamour. Simpler pleasures are offered in abundance - think tiny winding streets, quirky old bookshops, and centuries-old cafés.

Our annually updated guide brings Paris to life, transporting you there like no other travel guide does with expert-led insights and advice, detailed breakdowns of all the must-see sights, photographs on practically every page, and our hand-drawn illustrations which place you inside the city's iconic buildings and neighbourhoods.

You'll discover:

- our pick of Paris' must-sees, top experiences, and hidden gems
- the best spots to eat, drink, shop, and stay
- detailed maps and walks which make navigating the country easy
- easy-to-follow itineraries
- expert advice: get ready, get around, and stay safe
- colour-coded chapters to every part of Paris, from Champs-Élysées to Belleville, Montmartre to Montparnasse
- our new lightweight format, so you can take it with you wherever you go

Want the best of Paris in your pocket? Try our Top 10 Paris for top 10 lists to all-things Paris."

Top Ten:

"With a new design and unbeatable price, DK raises the bar on travel guides with its new Top 10 Travel Guide series. Whether on business or vacation, take the work out of planning any trip with DK's Top 10 Travel Guides. Building on the success of the Eyewitness Travel Guides, DK has created a new series that makes finding the best every destination has to offer even easier than before. Whether searching for the finest cuisine or cheapest places to eat, the most luxurious hotels or best deals on places to stay, the coolest family destination or hottest nightspot, the Top 10 format allows travelers to use the insights of experts to make the most of their vacation. Accompanied by a companion website, readers can share their experiences and vote for their own personal Top 10s."

For those, who don't read through all the comments, my blogger friend Lectrice just added a link to the Dorling Kindersley page where you can get a closer look into the book.

Bonnett, Alastair "Off the Map"

Bonnett, Alastair "Off the Map" - 2014

Cartophilia is the love of maps. I certainly have that. It combines well with topophilia, the love of place. I think I suffer from both of them and this is a great book for those of us who are addicted to cards.

Alastair Bonnett, a professor of Social Geography from Newcastle, lists a lot of interesting, weird, forgotten, lost, invisible places in this book and describes them very accurately. There are places we don't want to visit (like Pripyat near Chernobyl), places we can't visit (like Mount Athos, well, at least not the female part of this world), places that don't exist anymore (or have been renamed), places that would be fun just to visit because of their weird identity (Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands is an interesting example and definitely on our list) and lots of curious, weird, quirky places that it's just fun to read about.

So, if like me, you love geography and/or maps, this is the book for you. Get your atlas out and read it.

From the back cover:

"In a world of Google Earth, it is easy to believe that every discovery has been made and every adventure had, Off the Map is a stunning testament to how mysterious our planet still is. It takes us into unchartered territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none.

From forgotten enclaves to floating islands, from hidden villages to New York gutter spaces, Off the Map charts the hidden corners of our planet. And while these are not necessarily places you would choose to visit on holiday - Hobyo, the pirate capital of Somalia, or Zheleznogorsk, a secret military town in Russia - they each carry a story about the strangeness of place and our need for a geography that understands our hunger for the fantastic and the unexpected. But it also shows us that topophilia, the love of place, is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. Whether you are an urban explorer or an armchair traveller, Off the Map will inspire and enchant. You'll never look at a map in quite the same way again."

Garfield, Simon "On the Map"

Garfield, Simon "On the Map. Why the World Looks the Way it Does" (aka: "On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks") - 2012

I have always loved maps. They are beautiful, they tell tales of far away countries, exotic worlds, people I will never meet, life at different times. How can anybody not like maps. They teach us so much, yet they are also an art form to admire and enjoy.

Simon Garfield has put together a collection of stories about maps through the ages. He does not just tells us what the most interesting maps are, he tells us the whole history. What did the first known map look like, how did it change over time, why do we draw maps the way we do, what do they tell us?

Any map is a drawing of a location as well as a political statement. While most of the first maps were drawn for sea voyagers and a lot of the continents were only known as an outline, things have changed. There is a long way from the Mercator to the Google Map. Simon Garfield tells us about this trip. He introduces the oldest map and the biggest map, he shows us how maps could help stop diseases, how guidebooks changed the way of travel and how satellite navigation changes our way of looking at the world.

If someone didn't care for maps before they got this book in their hands, they certainly will afterwards. There are stories behind every map. For example, I really liked the one about Phyllis Pearsall who walked the streets of London in order to publish the London A-Z. And he even mentions an episode from one of my favourite television shows, "The West Wing", where Press Secretary C.J. Cregg and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman attend a briefing by cartographers who want to change all maps in schools from the Mercator to the Peters Projection map and explain that Greenland is a lot smaller than Africa (fourteen times smaller, in fact), something you would never guess if you looked at the well-known Mercator map.

In one article, the author describes the way a lot of computer games are based on maps. This reminded me of one of our favourite first games called Bushbuck. It was a treasure hunt, you would be given an object that was well known for a certain town (usually the capital of a country) and you had to fly there. Along the way you would receive hints until you found the town. It was a wonderful game and we found exotic places like Tuvalu and Kiribati. A wonderful way to learn the countries and their capitals, unfortunately it does not seem to exist anymore.

If you didn't get the idea until now, I really loved this book.

One of my favourite quotes on page 63: "Most [maps] share a common purpose: they were not intended for use, at least not for travel use. Rather, they were statements of philosophical, political, religious, encyclopedic and conceptual concerns."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketches of philosophers and explorers through to Google Maps and beyond, Simon Garfield examines how maps both relate and realign our history.

With a historical sweep ranging from Ptolemy to Twitter, Garfield explores the legendary, impassable (and non-existent) mountains of Kong, the role of cartography in combatting cholera, the 17th-century Dutch craze for Atlases, the Norse discovery of America, how a Venetian monk mapped the world from his cell and the Muppets' knack of instant map-travel. Along the way are pocket maps of dragons, Mars, murders and more, with plenty of illustrations and prints to signpost the route.

From the bestselling and widely-adored author of Just My Type, On The Map is a witty and irrepressible examination of where we've been, how we got there and where we're going."

Winchester, Simon "The Map that Changed the World"

Winchester, Simon "The Map that Changed the World: A Tale of Rocks, Ruin and Redemption" - 2001

This was one of the most interesting scientific books I ever read. William Smith, an ordinary boy in the 18th century, discovers the history of our planet. He was the first to find that the earth is arranged in layers, he found fossils that were different from those in other areas, he detects that England has to have been under water once, he discovers the ice age. He made a geological map of England that looks very much like the one they still use today. Amazing. I loved to read the story of this ordinary guy who changed mapmaking forever, who discovered so much without ever having been educated that way. He laid the groundwork for so many other scientific discoveries that would change the world forever. This is a book everybody should read.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"The fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world's first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology."