Ypres, War Memorials and Chocaholic Alert

For our summer holiday, our children said they'd like to go to the Menin Gate in Ieper, Belgium, as they'd been there on a school trip and wanted to revisit the town.

The Menin gate is very moving, 55,000 soldiers without graves whose names are carved onto pretty much every wall at the gate.  They came from all over the world to serve the British Empire; the memorial itself is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and is an extraordinary tribute to men who traveled thousands of kilometers to serve a King that most of them probably knew very little about.

When my children went, they were given the name of a distant relative to look up on the wall, as was everyone in their class.  The fact that our uncommon surname was on the wall, with the same spelling, is testimony to just how many lives were wasted in the name of nation building.

We attended the last post, which had the same solemnity to it from Anzac Day's I've spent in places like Wakool and Barham/Koondrook.  There was a much larger crowd than I had anticipated, and judging from the languages and accents there were people from Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa present.  The ceremony is very simple, there are no speeches, just the volunteers from the Fire Brigade bugling the Last Post and then a laying of wreaths.

At the conclusion of the ceremony there is no clapping or acknowledgment of the moment, people simply head back to wherever they came from.  The walk back to our hotel left me wondering about why this war happened and what were people thinking at the time to travel from places like India, Nepal, Malaysia and Australia 

The British still refer to the city by it's French name of Ypres, but these days it goes by it's Flemish name of Ieper. 

The Grote Markt is impressive, particularly as the Cloth Hall was razed during the war, and as a Unesco World Heritage site it's worth visiting the city to see this building alone.  The Cloth Hall was rebuilt around 1926 onwards but the rebuild is so close to other Gothic structures of that period that to the untrained eye there's no difference.  If you want to see how the Cloth Hall looked at the end of the war, the CWGC has a photo at Cloth Hall.

Finally, if you do go to Ieper, and you want to buy chocolate, and let's face it, buying chocolate in Belgium is heaven for choco lovers, then you should go to the VanDaele store in the Grote Markt http://www.vandaele-ieper.be/.  You really should.