Brussels sits at the center of something significant. Within a few hours in any direction you have Strasbourg, home to the European Parliament, Rotterdam, one of the largest ports in the world, The Hague, where international law is adjudicated, and Cologne, a major hub of European economic life. This is not a coincidence. The entire architecture of transatlantic relations, NATO security commitments, EU governance, and international diplomacy is concentrated in this corner of the continent. Being based in Brussels means being positioned in the middle of all of it, which for someone studying politics and law is a hard place to beat.

What a lot of people do not realize is that Brussels is surrounded by medieval history. Ghent is right there, a city that looks like it was frozen in the 13th century and somehow kept running. The architecture, the old guild houses, the cobblestone streets, it all sits alongside a very much alive modern city. Europe does not treat its history as a museum exhibit. It just builds around it and keeps going, which is something you notice the more time you spend here.

An hour outside Brussels by train and the entire atmosphere shifts. You step off into a canal town where swans are literally floating through the city center, people are cycling along the waterways, and there is almost no visible political presence whatsoever. No law firms, no lobbyists, no EU flags in every window or NATO military bases. Just a quiet, old European town doing its thing completely unbothered by the machinery an hour down the track.

The distances here are short but the differences are massive. You can go from the capital of Western institutional power to a medieval canal town to an international court city all in the same afternoon. In the US that kind of variety would require crossing multiple states and probably a few time zones. Here it is just a train ride, which changes how you think about what Europe actually is beyond the political abstraction of it.