A Sunday morning at Belgium's largest weekly antique market. Streets of stalls, a good mix of prices, and why it's worth going more than once a year.

Seven in the morning felt ambitious even for us. Half the stalls were still being unpacked, crates on the cobbles, nobody quite ready. We stood there with our coffee and waited for the town to catch up.

Tongeren holds its antique market every Sunday, and it's the kind you can actually finish. Smaller than the big ones like L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, but weekly, which counts for something. The stalls run along a handful of streets in the old centre, Leopoldwal and Veemarkt among them, and spill into the covered halls and the underground parking at Julianus, where more vendors set up a little further in.

We parked just outside the main street and walked into the market from there, easy enough even in February.

Go between eight and nine. Any earlier and you're watching people set up rather than actually looking. A few hours is genuinely enough to see it all, which made the whole morning feel a lot less overwhelming than the larger markets we've done.

The mix is what makes it. Cheaper stalls with things worth digging through, and proper antique dealers a few metres along with whole sets, styled and considered, the kind of collection that takes years to put together. Prices sat somewhere reasonable in between. Friendly, unhurried, the sort of market you'd happily do twice a year.