Brussels

Brussels hides its beauty on purpose and rewards those who look up: art nouveau façades coiling like plants above shop fronts, comic-strip murals ambushing you at corner turns, and then — through an unremarkable archway — the Grand Place, a square so completely gilded that first-timers audibly inhale. The city runs the European Union with one hand and the world's best beer cellar with the other.

The sensible traveller enters the Grand Place twice: by day for the gold, at night for the floodlit theater; pays the small comic pilgrimage from mural to mural toward the Comics Art Museum; and takes Horta's own house in Saint-Gilles as the art nouveau masterclass it is. Between stops: frites from a proper baraque, chocolate from an artisan not an airport brand, and a lambic beer aged in the valley where wild yeast does the work.

The Guide's honesty: the famous urinating boy is fifty-five centimeters of national irony — go for the costume calendar, stay for the joke —; the EU quarter is offices, not sights: the Parlamentarium visit is the exception that works; and Brussels sits one cheap train from Bruges and Ghent — but she is a residence, not a lobby: give her the nights and she pays in beer cellars.