Product Description

The Eyewitness Travel Guide to Brussels, Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp isyour ticket to an unforgettable holiday in this charming andunderstated region of Belgium. The full-colour guide is updated andexpanded, with over 500 photographs, maps and illustrations. The newStreet Finder mapping will take you straight to best of Belgium’shistorical art museums, breweries, and cheese and chocolate tours, andthe in-depth background information will ensure you don’t miss a thing.The guide highlights the best places to sample Belgian cuisine (oftenranked even higher than French) and the full range of Belgian beers,plus dozens of accommodation reviews for every budget. With exquisitecutaways and detailed floor plans of all the major sights, and 3Daerial views, this is the ultimate guide to Brussels, Bruges, Ghent& Antwerp.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102102 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Review
No other guide whets your appetite quite like this one. (The Independent )

Customer Reviews

Excellent clear and useful guide for these stunning Belgium cities!
I have used many Dorling Kindersley gidebooks and they are all visually stunning.

This one is exceptional though. I love Belgium - if you like interesting history and architecture and decent food (and chocolate!) or are "into" lace (!?) then Belgium is the place to go. the fact that you can see Bruges, Ghent and Brussels in a long weekend is a real draw for me.

This volume - exceptional value at less than £7.50 is all you will need for the four cities on the cover. It's only Antwerp that I haven't been to with this guide - yet!

So, what's inside? Maps of all the important parts of teh cities, history of each area, important places to go with addresses and opening times, places to stay and eat. In fact everything you could want to know and see.

I whole-heartedly recommend this DK book. Go to Ghent and see the castle and the Gothic cathedral. Visit Bruges and go to the Groening museum, the Markt and the Stadhuis (try the Rabbit stew and the Chicken Waterzooi soup they are favulous!) Or go to Brussels where there are too nuemrous places to mention here but don't forget the museums and the Manneken Pis!

Enjoy!

Brussels and Ghent
As with all the DK Eyewitness Travel, the guide are informative and a delight, with lots of great photos, the 3-D drawn maps and so much detail for when you are in the museums, churches etc. Used it for Brussels and Gent and despite having been to Brussels many times discovered so much more using this guide. The one suprising omission is any public transport maps - at least a map of the Brussels metro would have been expected, although the free map we got from the hotel had this.

It's not what it tells you....
...but what is doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I usually love the Dorling Kindersley guides. Their luscious illustrations more than make up for their bulk and slightly quirky layout. But I found that this one let me down when we arrived in Belgium. We'd heard that there was a zoo in Antwerp, and figured that it would be open on a Monday, when most of the other cultural attractions in Belgium seem to close. But this book doesn't mention it. Not that they can argue that it's out of town (it's right next to the station). Nor can they argue that it's a minor attraction, as they include the Printing Museum (and the streets of Belgium hardly echo with cries of "Daddy, Daddy, take as to see all those typefaces!"). Has DK decided to censor all references to zoos on moral grounds? I know some people do object to zoos, but Antwerp appears to be reasonably well run and doesn't seem to attract a lot of international criticism. But why not let the reader decide? After all, some people object to the diamond and fashion trade, but their museums are featured.
Also, why no map of the Metro?
So DK let me down. Being in a foreign country without free internet access to check I felt lost! And I wondered, if they omit this, what else don't they tell you?