The archeological excavations in Taxila make for a great day-trip from Islamabad. The sites can be thoroughly explored in about 6 hours of walking, if the oppressive heat allows. The sites and museum display Buddhist sculptures, metal artifacts and coins, and other interesting finds from times gone by. Don't miss the Dharmarajika stupa the 3rd century BCE

The MIM: a museum that invites you to admire some 1200 instruments and pieces in a stunning Art Nouveau building situated next to the Place Royale in Brussels.

The beguinages of Flanders and the Netherlands are always oases of calm and stillness, where you might still expect to see an old beguine mumbling her prayers in a doorway. Two of Ghent’s three beguinages have been included on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Although the Old St Elizabeth Beguinage, in Begijnhofdries in Ghent, is no longer enclosed by a wall, making it simply part of the city, it still has a unique atmosphere. Today the Old St Elizabeth Beguinage is known as ‘holy corner’, a place of religious tolerance, because it has no less than three different churches: one is Roman Catholic, one is Orthodox and the other is Protestant. From bleachfield to orchard This open beguinage grew into something of a ‘beguine city’ in the 13th century, with a church, the ‘Grootjuffer’s House’, an infirmary, a chapel, more than a hundred houses for beguines, a bleachfield (a field where linen was laid out to bleach) and an orchard. After the French Revolution, with increasing industrialisation, the inhabitants moved to their new beguinage in Sint-Amandsberg in 1873.