Tongeren: The Oldest Town in Belgium

Ok, for those of you who probably wonder where Tongeren is; don’t even bother to find it in a map, I can tell you that it is a small city about an hour from Brussels and Aachen, Germany and maybe 30 minutes outside of Maastricht, Netherland. Find these 3 cities in your map and perhaps you can imagine more or less where Tongeren is.

The population in Tongeren is only about 29,000 people and after 2 weeks that I worked there, I feel that I know already 150 of them! Those are the people who work in our company plus some of the hotel’s staff! But seriously, the city is really small that everytime you go in a restaurant, you feel immediately that you are foreigners in there as the whole restaurant knew and greeted each other but yourself!!!

Amazing from this city is only that the natives there speak minimum 4 languages!! Their actual mother language is Flemish (a local dialect which combines Dutch and French), then they started to learn the correct Dutch and French in school, and later on they have the possibility to learn either English or German (well, if English is your choice, you will have no problem understanding German also as it is not so different from Dutch). What a very multilingual community!!!

Pictures of Tongeren:

1. The city is surrounded by old city wall
2. The 15th Century church dome stands arrogantly in the middle of the city center
3. Ok this one is my fave!! This actually a one-way street in the direction of the approaching car. Don't ask me why they decided to put a traffic light pointing to the opposite direction, too. But officially you are not allowed to go on the opposite direction, except of course if you are a tourist who doesn’t really familiar with the local situation or should I say, Belgian’s logic??