To many people’s disappointment, the winter holiday season is once again over, and the world is back to its everyday life. While many Belgians went on or dreamt of a fun and snowy ski trip abroad, hundreds of thousands of international tourists found their way to our own Venice of the North, Bruges. One of the people who makes these trips possible is retired language teacher and city guide Frank Vanwalleghem. He has been spreading his love for Bruges for over forty years, and I spoke to him about his past experiences in the field. It seems that, between the variety of skills you need to become a guide and the funny stories about people from all over the world, there are also some important lessons we could learn from the “holiday sector” – about history, about culture and about future.
A sociocultural everyman
Before you can even think of touring people around cities or museums, there are some important skills you need to have in your backpack. One of the prerequisites to become a tour guide is knowing how to interact with different groups of people, and social skills are therefore essential. “As a guide, you need a certain amount of psychological insight. Within 10 minutes, you have to find out what the group you’ve got is like. Who are they? What do they want? And then you have to adapt. It’s not what the guide wants that matters.” Frank stresses how important it is to not forget the individuality of the people in front of you. “You have to make sure that your group leaves Bruges with the feeling that they had what they came for, and that’s different for all groups. It is even more difficult when you have different parties in one group. Then you have to find the equilibrium, so that everybody is pleased.”
“You can’t be perfect, there’s no such thing as a perfect guided tour”
However, social aptitude alone isn’t going to bring you far. The most important job of a guide is to inform the tourists on his tour. According to Frank, following a formal training plays a crucial part in gaining knowledge and honing your skills. “When I was taking the course to become a guide, I thought that I had to study lots of things that were completely useless, for instance, the geography of West Flanders. Until you have a group that ask you about it. Once I guided a professor with graduates from an art school. Again, that’s when you need the background knowledge, because they asked questions about how those paintings were made, not what they represent. Of course, you can’t be perfect, there’s no such thing as a perfect guided tour, but there’s a lot more to it than simply walking around with people and telling them what the age and function of a building is.”
The now retired teacher of English, German and Dutch also adds there are some other useful skills, which he obtained by teaching. “I think it’s a remnant of the teachers training, that, if participants ask you a question, you don’t just answer the question immediately. You start where the problem actually originates from and you build up an answer, so that they not only have the immediate answer, but the whole context around it.” His background as a language teacher is also very useful. “You have the knowledge of the languages, but also the cultural knowledge. For instance, when I guide British tourists and I talk about the horse carts, I can not only tell them that Charles II founded the regiment, but also that he was here in Bruges because his father was beheaded and he was here in exile, and that he later went back to defeat Cromwell. And because I know large parts of that history, it’s more interesting for both them and me.” Still, it’s important to remember that teaching and guiding isn’t the same thing. “I think it’s terrible when participants notice I’m a teacher. I don’t want to be a teacher when guiding. You can use your skills, but guiding is obviously not the same as giving a lecture to a group of students.”
It’s a small world after all
The tourists taking Frank’s tours come from all over the world, and naturally, they all have different cultural backgrounds. As a guide, it is important to keep these differences into consideration. “You can tell Northern European people about history in quite some detail, because they will know what you’re talking about. If we have groups from Asia or Northern America, however, there is no point in telling them about all the counts and countesses. They generally have much less historical background. You have to focus on the more general way of life in the Middle Ages, for instance.” Even certain parts of history can be sensitive for some groups of people, Frank says. “The strangest experience I had was around 1995. I was guiding a German group and I was telling them about Michelangelo’s statue ‘The Madonna of Bruges’ in the Church of Our Lady. And one of them said that it had left the church before. I said, yes, the French took it during the French Revolution and the Germans after the war. And he asked why. I thought, ‘They’re German, let’s be careful. We don’t want to insult them.’ So I said, ‘Probably to keep it safe.’ And the man didn’t say anything anymore. But then some 100 meters further, he came walking next to me and said in German, ‘You were right, and I was one of them.’”
However, these different cultural backgrounds and sensitivities are not only a drawback. “You have to make contact with so many different people. And this in turn makes it easier to connect with all kinds of people here at home, outside of guiding, as well. You really enhance your everyday skills.” On top of that, guiding all these people with their different experiences and expectations also makes for some funny stories. “Once I was telling a group about the Church of Our Lady, which was built between, roughly speaking 1220 and 1414. And suddenly, one of the participants went to the wall of the church and kind of knocked on that wall. I thought, that’s strange, and I asked him: ‘Why did you do that?’ And he said: ‘I had no idea that this church was a real thing. I thought that this was something made up, like a historical setting.’”
“When guiding, you start to appreciate some things of which at first you would have thought: ‘What a strange habit.’”
On top of that, according to the tour guide, the real beauty of all these different cultural backgrounds is also that you learn to open your eyes to the world, and change your previous views. “For example, don’t say that Americans don’t know anything about culture, as many people still do to this day: they come to Bruges and they don’t know which country they are in. Okay, that’s true for maybe 5% of them. But I have met lots of Americans who know or are eager to know a lot about Bruges and Belgium. And you even start to understand why some cultural and societal institutions are possible in those countries. Of course, the people who choose to take a guided tour are not just any people, they are a smaller subset of the total population and have an eagerness to know more about the mindset and culture around here. But still, when guiding, you start to appreciate some aspects of foreign societies of which at first you would have thought: ‘What a strange habit.’”
It’s all about the money… or is it?
As someone who stands in very close contact with all these different people that come to Bruges, Frank has some issues with today’s often one-sided, economic view on the tourists. “Tourists bring money that Bruges needs. But I have difficulties with news articles that value them only according to the amount of money they have spent. If you say that we only want tourists that spend a lot of money, I’m afraid that I wouldn’t be welcome in Bruges either.” For cities like Bruges, tourists are often crucial for their city revenue, but instead of seeing them as just walking bags of money, Frank thinks we should open our eyes to the other benefits they bring. “I don’t know if Bruges would have been so nice if it hadn’t been for the tourists. If you look at pictures of 50, 60 years ago, Bruges was perhaps more authentic, but it also wasn’t half of what it looks like now. Moreover, people also come simply to enjoy the atmosphere of the tourists walking in Bruges: it is like being immersed in a holiday atmosphere.” Still, it is important to find the right balance. “When you know that there are 65 chocolate shops in Bruges, and that every second house is a cafe or a souvenir shop… in that respect, tourism is a double-edged sword. Bruges needs it, what would the city do without tourists? But we also have to make sure that we don’t destroy the atmosphere, culture and history the tourists are coming for.”
“If the only thing we, as human beings, are concerned with is everything that is practical, wouldn’t that be rather limited?”
Keeping this cultural heritage alive remains very important to the city guide. “If you forget your past, you forget your identity. We have to remember where we come from and who we are. For instance, with the cruise tourists, I walk through a narrow street in Bruges: the road is lined with brick gables, and not one of them is straight. And I say: ‘This is beautiful. This is what it must have been like in the past.’ I think we have to keep things like that, just to remember. I am not pleading to go back, not at all. But I mean, if you have a look at the smaller houses, and you think of the family with four or five children that used to live in such a small house. That’s where we come from. That’s amazing.” However, Frank recognizes that, when it comes to conservation, the line between too little and too much often isn’t clear. “What if you spend millions of euros on the restoration of a cathedral? Some will say it is important, but I know that others will think: ‘Couldn’t they have used the money in a more useful way?’ It’s a discussion that won’t go away, there is not one straight answer to that question. But if the only thing we, as human beings, are concerned with is everything that is practical, wouldn’t that be rather limited?’”
From the past back to the future
An important change in this conservation of historical buildings and items is the digital revolution. In Frank’s opinion, it brings some massive benefits. “It has become a lot easier to consult sources, and the Internet itself is a very good source. Also a tricky one, you have to check what you find online. But the digitalization of old documents and so on is fantastic. You can see books which no library would ever lend to anyone, and rightfully so. Now lots of archives have been digitalized, and it makes things accessible to so many people. For example, one of the books of the Gruuthuse family, in possession of the National Library in France, has been sold to the Hague. The library made scans of every page and even translated it. And now, if you want to read it, you go to the site, and you can simply scroll through the book. You can see every page. Isn’t that wonderful?”
On top of that, museums have also adapted to the new digital possibilities. “At the Historium, they made a virtual reality experience: they simulate the painter Van Eyck in the year 1435, with his painting The Virgin and Canon van der Pale, and then you see historical Bruges in eight different 3D experiences. Some people say it’s too superficial, but not everyone coming to Bruges wants to have a thorough view, they are not all historians. For some people, this is exactly what they want. A quick view with, of course, historically correct information. The whole thing lasts only an hour, but the tourists have an excellent view of what there is, and the experience is more interesting for them.” However, digitalisation is a challenge for tour guides themselves too. “As a tour guide you have to add an extra value. If you can only tell them what they can hear on an audio guide… That’s not enough. You have to give the people a more personal experience. Otherwise, why bother getting a guided tour?”
Digitalisation is however only one of many things that changed tourism. “There’s also an evolution that started back in the nineties. A guided tour had to be 90% informative and 10% entertaining. That’s what they taught us at the time, but now, things have changed. They’re calling the tours the Bruges “experience”. It’s the new fashion word I guess. The informative part has decreased, I think to 50, maybe 60%. The guide nowadays has to be more of an entertainer, and why not? But that’s still a large way from being a jester.” Frank further underlines the importance of finding the right balance. “You have, for instance, the tour ‘Legends of Bruges’, which is about amazing stories and people from Bruges, but it is a far cry from objective, accurate history. Then what do we do? We try and prove that what we’re telling is at least partly true, that it has a real historical seed. And I notice people appreciating it. They get the impression that we’re not only telling tall stories, but one way or another, there’s some truth in them as well.”
The skills and knowledge of a guide are not as self-evident as they seem, and the tourism sector with its cultural landscape is much more alive than one may think of a field often associated with history and the past. It seems it isn’t such a bad idea to apply some of the values and observations from the “holiday” sector to our own lives, just like Frank does when he deals with digital change or learns to appreciate a culture we only know from outdated stereotypes. One thing is sure: the experiences of a city guide really do broaden one’s perspective on culture and society, and that can only be positive.