In Bruges

So, I watched a movie over the summer during one of those long shifts at the library when no one walked in called “In Bruges” and I had never really heard of Bruges before that, but it looked beautiful in the movie. We spent our first weekend traveling there… and the movie did not exaggerate.

But let’s start back at the beginning. So on Friday afternoon Aunna, Brad, and I got out of class around noon and took a train into Lux City. We hadn’t bought our tickets to Bruge yet, so it was a pleasant surprise that the tickets cost only 18 euro round trip! Just as we walked out of the ticket office, we noticed that the next train leaving for Brussels, where we would have to catch a connection to Bruges, left in five minutes! So we hurried and ran on the train literally as the doors were closing. We felt pretty good about ourselves because that shaved an hour of waiting off our travel time! The train to Brussels took about three hours, and after another clutch train catching – this time involving quickly checking the train schedule to find the next train to Bruges, running to the platform, and then realizing the platform changed to one platform over – it was only an hour to Bruges. Not much worth mentioning about the train ride except we saw some live action role play people. They sat down right next to us with their huge painted foam swords and spears and shields and belts of daggers and gauntlets and all that stuff. They were in fantasy-like period dress and one of the girls was even wearing cat ears. It was real strange. Brad loved them and got a picture with two of the guys and kept asking to hold their weapons. Anyways.

Bruges is a beautiful, medieval city, so even our first views of the city as we walked to the hostel were great. Our hostel, Passage, was only a ten minute walk from the train station, so we were happy to get there and drop off our giant bags before grabbing a very handy map and heading off into the city to explore. We hit the two big tourist areas before dinner, the Markt and the Burg, and admired the beautiful architecture there. In the Markt was the Belfry, a giant old watchtower… but more on that later. We got dinner at this great, hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served cheap homemade food and I really liked it. I tried fish there because even though fish isn’t my favorite, it’s kind of a specialty of Bruges. I enjoyed it, but next time I think I’ll just go with chicken. After that we found an ice cream place that our map suggested called “Da Vinci.” I think it was supposed to be like gelato and it was good… but I can’t wait to get back to real gelato. After that we did some people watching in the Markt. Brad had bought two ice cream cones because he thought it was more economical than buying one cone with two scoops, and when we were sitting down he dropped one of them in the dirt. And then still ate it. Oh dear… After that we wandered a little bit longer and then turned in for the night so that we would be well-rested to explore the next day.

My first hostel experience was pretty good. I had a comfy blanket and it wasn’t loud at all. Our roommates the first night were two girls from Australia who are studying in Europe also. Since they spoke English it was fun to get to know them a little before we went to sleep. They left in the morning and we got new roommates Saturday night, but they were already asleep when we got in and spoke French anyways.

On Saturday we started off the day with Belgium waffles! I just got your basic waffle with powdered sugar, but don’t worry; I got more interesting waffles as the trip continued. After that we worked off our waffles by climbing 366 winding steps to the top of the aforementioned Belfry tower. It was a gorgeous view, but I was a little disappointed to find that the top of the tower was in the middle of reconstruction so we could only look out of two of the sides. Nonetheless, the pictures are beautiful and it was worth the climb.

After that we met up with some other Miami students and explored for awhile. I spent a little time at a fish market from the 1800s that is now used as a sort of flea market place on Saturdays. I bought a little sketch of Bruges and if it doesn’t get too expensive I might try to find something similar in every city I got to. But we’ll see. During our wandering we proceeded to see Michelangelo’s “Madonna with Child,” see lollipops being made, buy some delicious Belgian chocolates, and lose half of our group. Good thing we agreed on a meeting place!

After wandering, we took a thirty-minute boat tour. Because of its canals, Bruges is sometimes called the Venice of the North. The tour was really fun, firstly because of the beautiful views from the canals that you can’t always see from the streets and secondly because our tour guide was hilarious. He gave commentary in like five different languages and kept making sarcastic comments about the other boat drivers we passed. I wanted to be like best friends with him, but alas we never really got to meet him. Haha. Some more wandering and souvenir buying later, we all met up again for dinner outside by a canal. I didn’t like the food as much, but there were many more people and that lent to some good conversation. After dinner our large group split up again, some people going back to hostels for a quick nap, and I got more waffles with Aunna, Brad, Lindsay, and Zach. This time we got ice cream and chocolate on them. Awesome. I had a lot of fun getting to know Lindsay and Zach better since I didn’t really know them before this trip. We hung out at the bar underneath Zach and Lindsay’s hostel for awhile that night and attempted to find a place to go dancing, but that epically failed. Instead we ended up back at our hostel playing a weird card game called Indian that involved putting cards on our forehead and Zach probably making up all the rules as we went along.

Sunday morning was pretty uneventful since most stores are either closed or open later. We found more waffles in the morning – this time with strawberries! – and these were probably my favorite of the whole weekend. We met up with the larger group for a little while but ultimately decided to leave Bruges a little bit earlier to have some time to unwind at home. So we caught a train home, once again making very successful train connections despite our train arriving late in Brussels, and relaxed the rest of the day.

I’m really glad we went to Bruges on the first weekend because it was such an easy tourist city. It was entirely a walking city so there was no need to figure out buses or a metro system and it was so cheap to get there! So I made it through my first weekend travel experience without any bad experiences… Hopefully this trend will continue. Now its back to classes…

Just a random little thing. I spent about fifteen minutes listening to Christmas music while I was writing this before I realized I was listening to Christmas music. Weird.