Lille and Ypres

For our last family European trip, we took the Eurostar to Lille, a city in northern France. We just spent one night, so only had time to walk some of the grand squares, do a little shopping and of course sample some French food.

My favorite part of Lille was visiting the chocolate and sweet shop Meert. First, isn't it lovely? And second, they have this local waffle speciality where they sandwich these very thin waffles with a sweet filling in the middle. We were surprised how good they were. They're called gaufre and well-worth trying.

Next we headed off to Ypres (or Ieper, or Leper, depending on the language in this tri-language country). It's a beautiful little town that had to be completely rebuilt after it was destroyed in World War I. Ypres was a strategic route for the Germans to march into France in October of 1914. They were stopped here by the Allies in the same year. The famous Christmas truce took place in the fields outside Ypres, then the fighting continued here until 1918 when the war ended. The last photo shows the town in 1919. Everything in the town was destroyed. The photo above it is of the same location now. They rebuilt the town as close as they could to how it looked originally, so it's still a charming little town. We enjoyed that it was a nice small size with plenty of shops and restaurants and central to so many of the places we wanted to see.