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The Walker Art Center is one of the major contemporary art museums in the U.S., housing some of the most iconic and innovative visual, performing, and mixed media art in the world. The Center hosted the first major museum exhibits by Joseph Cornell, Frank Gehry, Julie Mehretu, and Maria Merz and has acquired work by O’Keeffe and Warhol. Exhibitions here push the boundaries and strive to engage the audience in unique ways.

Here’s a bold claim: the Olympic Sculpture Park might just have something for everyone. Located on the waterfront, not far from Pike Place Market, it features great views of Puget Sound (well, on clear days) and the ferries going back and forth. Stroll the paths and admire the sculptures large and small scattered throughout the park, or sit on the many chairs and benches and admire the view. There’s a nearby bike trail, and the Neukom Vivarium (a giant 60-foot rainforest log ecosystem in a greenhouse) is just steps away. Best of all, it’s free! Get a dose of culture and then head down to the waterfront for some fish ‘n’ chips.

Before hops came into vogue, brewers used gruit, an old-fashioned herbal mix, to give beer its flavor. This medieval mansion is the house that gruit built, and contains all the trappings of a wealthy family in the Middle Ages, including tools, furniture, silver and gold objects and a startlingly realistic terra-cotta bust of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, under whose rule the city prospered.

For centuries Sint-Janshospitaal was a refuge for the poor and sick, although today it shelters precious inmates of another sort. Housed in the canalside jumble of medieval buildings is a stellar modern art collection, plus six works by the Early Netherlandish master Hans Memling, a German artist who moved to Bruges in the 15th century. His small-scale paintings, with their minute attention to detail, are considered by many experts to be among the finest in the Northern European tradition.

If romantic Bruges hasn’t already won your heart, catch a taxi to this quiet park in the south of the city. Legend has it that this is the final resting place of a virtuous maiden from Roman times who defied her father’s wishes by marrying a warrior. Whatever happened here long ago, it’s a lovely place for a stroll under shady trees. Make sure to cross the bridge over the lake with the one you love: Your bond will last into eternity, or so goes the legend.

It feels like you’re dining at the house of a wealthy burgher at this just-so bastion of new cuisine charmingly known as the Silver Peacock. Red deer, hare, pheasant and seafood fill the menu, and there’s a full tasting menu for vegetarians. The mood is elegant and celebratory.

As the name suggests, you may end up waiting outside this modern chocolate emporium before getting a taste of the novelties inside. Choose from the experimental chocolate lipstick and chocolate pills, or head straight for the ganache-filled bonbons of wondrously creative chocolatier Dominique Persoone, such as an Atlanta infused with cola, or a wasabi-laced Green Tokyo.

One of the church’s most celebrated treasures has also been the most poorly guarded: Not once but twice, a diminutive marble sculpture of the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo has disappeared—first carried off by French revolutionaries and then by the Nazis—and both times been recovered. The Italian Renaissance sculptor-painter probably created the piece for Siena Cathedral, but prosperous Bruges merchants are said to have brought it north, installing it in what is still to this day one of the city’s most beautiful sanctuaries.

The towering 60-kilometer-long (37-mile-long) Pío XI Glacier, also called Brüggen, is the granddaddy of all Patagonian glacial ice fields. Located in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, the glacier takes a 90-degree turn on its way down to the sea and is almost twice as large as Singapore. Glaciologists are not entirely clear on why Pío XI is the rare glacier—along with Argentina’s nearby Perito Moreno at the base of the Torres del Paine cordillera—that is growing rather than receding.