advise on expanding my lens setup

[Tin Can]

In Bruges the movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Bruges

I enjoyed how wacky Brussels was in 1975. They would change the language used on the street signs for night or day also changing street directions making me lost while driving.

To get over my confusion, I stopped in a Pub where nobody would or could speak a bit of English. I had a great beer and then ignored all street signs thereafter. Just drive.

Got to the house and my key would not work. So I waited. Soon the Police arrive and they speak no English. Good thing I had already put the local address in my passport. Police noted that and left. Then my host showed up and we had a fantastic 3 hour dinner in a very cramped house of meat. We ate triangles of meat we cooked ourselves on our table, like a rotisserie. It was very expensive.

Eddy Merckx lived down the street. Look him up. A far better man than Lance...

[Corran]

If I had waited until I could afford a superior lens, I would have lost three years experience and a few remarkable images.

AMEN!!

Sorry, haven't read anything else but needed to give a shout on this comment Jac .

[Havoc]

I guess he could be looking at the Ugly Belgian Houses instagram. One of my favorites.

I don't need looking there, it is everywhere I look every day

On a serious note, there are a few nice spots in Belgium. Only, those are isolated spots in very few places. Belgium is ugly because there never has been any serious building planning or architectural planning over a timespan. You can find here and there a small spot, but most of Belgium is a hodgepodge of bad architecture. The result is that you cannot find any place that has a coherent feel or look. There isn't a single street that feels like it has "a look/vision" (*).

If you go to our neighbourghs then this coherence is there. Go to Paris and you can find the gracious and stately Haussmann boulevards. You can find La Défence with its cluster of contemporary buildings and vision. Or you can go to old cities like Pérouges, Concarneau, Carcassonne, Monpazier, Riom, Dinan, Troyes, Bourges and countless others. You may like one and not the other but each of them presents a coherent, sometimes historic, sometimes architectural whole. Want wide landscapes, go to the Jura or the Voges. Go into Germany and you have the same. Maybe a bit less of it in the large cities because so much has been rebuild after the war. You want modern, go to Frankfurt, Munich or others. Older, go to Quedlinburg, Goslar, Esslingen, Schmalkalden... Want wide landscapes? You got Bavaria, the nord part close to Denmark, the side of the Polish border.

But Belgium? The "famous" Brussels market place isn't the late medieval it looks to be just neo gothic destroyed to make it all into pubs and shops. There is a gothic cathedral but it is enclosed by '70's third rate hotel building trying to pretend to "blend in" and at the same time stick out as a pestulent sore. We had boulevards but they were "modernised" with 3th rate tries at modern architecture and even that failed to be beautiful as kitch. Ok, there are a few very nice art deco leftovers. But you couldn't say that in itself form they a kind of whole. Each is an isolated pearl sitting in a dungheap. Like the palais Stocklet or the narrowly saved Magazins Waucquez.

Speaking of Art Deco, if you go to Weimar and Dessau in search of the Bauhaus movement, then you will certainly come by the name of the belgian arcitect Henri Van De Velde. While well know with quite a lot of important influential buildings in Holland and Germany, it was up to some private persons to have is grave saved from demolition. His train staion in Blankenberge was demolished and not even replaced.

Went to look at the only remaining brick fortification of napoleontic date at the coast. It has been destroyed by the heritage fund.They simply broke away one of the 5 sides to insert a glass/steel block. And so it goes on.

You don't have to look for sweeping landscape either. Belgium is reknown (but not in a good sense) by its "lintbebouwing". Meaning the building just follows the older "highways" of the 1800's, completely cutting through whatever landscape there was cutting it up.

(*) only street I know of is the Cogels-Osylei in Antwerp and even that one has been only justly saved, adding another entry into the ugly belgian houses book.