Earlier this summer I admired the logo for the southern American supermarket chain Food Lion, a proud blue lion in a square lozenge.  I was enchanted by its graphic clarity and its Euro-regal pretensions.  It all seemed a bit much, and also exactly right, for a supermarket that stocked buckets of lard and a thousand varieties of barbecue sauce.  So I was surprised to spot the logo gracing a supermarket called Delhaize in Brussels.  It turns out that Food Lion is a subsidiary of the Belgian conglomerate (also called Delhaize) that owns the chain.  When they built the Food Lion brand they reused the same logo.

I imagined that the Food Lion lion had been concocted, “Mad Men” style, by an enterprising, low-ranking manager at the American headquarters in Salisbury, North Carolina sometime around 1962.  In a way the lion has become the mascot for my peripatetic summer.  What was there tying together my small-town Arkansas days and big-city European adventures?  “Le Lion,” was right there, all along, looking over me, and keeping me well.

The Ann Demeulemeester boutique in Antwerp’s lower city has the feeling of a temple.  It’s in the ground floors of an old brick building on a corner of Leopold de Waelplaats, which was previously a naval officer’s training school and then a chemical manufacturing facility.  The shop, eleven years old, reminds me of the Commes des Garcons shop in New York.  These small spaces are both idiosyncratic and timeless.  They reflect the graceful, contrarian visions of the fashion designers, and feel a bit like hallowed ground.  Incense was burning in the Demeulemeester boutique when we arrived, which felt just right.

The store is made from simple, striking elements.  The tall corner entrance door pivots open.  The worn wood floors are pocked with scars from the building’s previous lives.  And the walls are made from primed and framed painter’s canvases installed proud of the existing brick walls, which are painted black.  The open wood staircase in back takes one to a mezzanine where there are racks and racks of Demeulemeester’s strategically asymmetrical black and white garments.  Windows look down onto the street, which is lined with cafes, old apartment blocks, and trees.  It’s an authentic, avant-garde space that’s also peaceful.

We arrived at Brugge on an early morning train, when the streets were empty, and were able to experience the Belgian city in a state of quiet that, I suspect, most visitors don’t.  Emerging from the station, we turned toward the spires of the old city and walked in that direction.  Although the way was clearly marked, this felt like what it might feel like to approach the city as a pilgrim, on foot, from far away. Brugge is a web of narrow streets lined with tiny houses, and the churches soar above everything else.  Moving in silence, through mostly empty streets, and then entering the Cathedral of Sint Salvator, so explosively dramatic, was the closest I know to what it’s like to live in a Medieval world.

If we had been Medieval, we’d probably have walked from there to the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk, where there’s a famous madonna by Michelangelo.  Instead we took a boat tour through the canals, which was probably not Medieval, led by a ruddy swain who repeated his well-worn shtick to us in French, Dutch, Spanish and finally English.  The whole city seemed, from that vantage, fairy-tale pretty, with brick cottages, flower gardens, and swans and geese that looked as if they had been engineered by Walt Disney.  Then we sat down for a restful, rather posh lunch, which was definitely not Medieval.  When it was time to head back to the train station, in mid-afternoon, we had to cut through throngs of just-arriving tourists.  By that time the Medieval feeling had all but evaporated.

There’s a certain fatigue that sets in after you’ve been inside a museum for an hour.  It’s less physical than mental, and has to do with the stress of taking in a great deal all at once.  So smaller museums often offer a finer experience.  The collections are strongly focused and you’re not exhausted by the time you’re through.  The Design Museum in Gent strikes me this way. The museum has a smart collection of objects by well-known designers like Victor Horta and Christopher Dresser, as well as lesser-known ones, like Gustave Serrurier-Boy and Borek Sipak.

What’s best is how informal the displays are, and how many of the objects have been left unrestored, in their real, battered condition.  Less than a design museum, it seems, at times, like a museum of old everyday things.  I’m accustomed to seeing the Wassily chair in shining leather and chrome, in stores, in corporate waiting rooms, and in apartments.  But to see a vintage one, with cracked leather and spotted chrome, sitting right on the floor, along with other contemporary pieces, all similarly worn, is refreshing.  It reminds you how old (nearly a hundred years) so much canonical modern furniture is, and that it was intended to be used, not stuck on a pedestal at MoMa.