BRUGES, Belgium _ Els only has me for the morning, and she has a thousand years of history to cram in. We don't have time to dally.

We start at the Burg, the ancient center of this ancient town, a half-ring of artfully refurbished buildings. We dart inside the Basilica of the Holy Blood, a forbidding 12th-century stone church that holds a few drops of what is supposedly Jesus Christ's blood, but pause only long enough to take in the exterior of the ornate town hall, a 600-year-old Gothic structure topped with statues of old royalty.

We walk briskly through ...

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