In the brilliant dark comedy “In Bruges,” a mobster sends his two hitmen to Bruges to cool their heels after a job went horribly wrong. What the two men don’t know is that they were sent there so they could have a beautiful “fairy tale” experience before one partner was ordered to kill the other. Things don’t go quite as the boss had planned.

But he was right about one thing. The film’s brooding, atmospheric cinematography did create a fairy-tale, dream-like veil through which the city’s medieval history, fabulous architecture, graceful bridges, and misty canals are revealed.

In person, Bruges does not disappoint. It was one of my favorite stops on our European adventure a few years ago and I’d love to see more of it someday. There are more cobblestone streets to explore, more art museums to visit, more boat rides down misty canals. More Belgian chocolate, beer, and waffles for that matter.

But it was probably the canals I loved the most. Bruges is known as the Venice of the North, and since I wasn’t able to get to Venice this trip, it made this city even more special to me.

Then there was the history and the architecture! From the quaint little corners of the city to the spacious and grand central plaza with its flags and cafes, shops and towers. I half expected to see trolls peeking around the corners, knights in armor parading through the streets, or princesses peering through the arched windows.

Bruges was also full of fun and whimsy, comic surprises and delights: from the sign above a restaurant “water closet” to the intimate peek into a doctor’s office on display outside a ceramic shop; from the comforting clip-clop of horses hoofs coming up behind you to a great white whale rising out of the canal.

Then there was the chocolate, the waffles, and the beer . . . O my!

I’m not much of a beer drinker but I did find a fruity blend that suited me quite well.

These were just a few of my favorite memories of this fairy-tale, dream-like city. For more, watch the film, it won’t disappoint.

---

Surprisingly—or maybe not so much, knowing me—my novel When Things Go Missing is full of fairy tales too, as Cal, one of the protagonists, told his sister:

“Mom,” he shakes his head. “And you believe that shit? She was full of fairy tales, Kay, and you know it.”

Or when he looks closely at the tattoos scrawled across the woman lying beside him:

What he sees is like a page from a book of fairy tales, a living tapestry. He sees now how the tattoos he once viewed as harsh, as evidence of a hard life, aren’t harsh at all but beautiful and haunting and strangely familiar. They portray images from a forgotten past, from fairy tales he heard long ago. There are dragons and mermaids, wolves and unicorns, Red Riding Hood with her basket tucked under her arm as she wanders through the wild woods, Rapunzel leaning out the window with her long hair streaming down the tower wall, Rumpelstiltskin dancing before a fire, Beauty wrapped in the Beast’s arms. He turns her this way and that as he reads the stories of his youth painted on her arms and legs, scrawled across her back.

Or when his sister visits a church:

Kay is nervous about going, never having felt comfortable in a culture of angels and prophets and parting seas. She had no grounding there, no way of making sense of it, apart from the fairy tales her mother used to read her and Cal—stories she sensed expressed deep truths that couldn’t be told any other way.

When Things Go Missing is now available at Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble and other major retailers.