Beautiful Brugge

In the morning we jumped a train from Brussels to Brugge, this took us about an hour. Please note, I'm referring to Brugge in the proper way that the Bruggians do, in Dutch! Mariya has decided to use the French approach with Bruges =P

The first thing that leapt out at me as we pulled into the Brugge train station was the message on the train announcing our arrival at Brugge, "We Komen aan in Brugge" ... ok that's not French, it's surprisingly close to German and I understand what they're saying (basically "We're coming into Brugge"), I took a guess and said to Mariya, "Hey that's probably Dutch!" and it turned out I was right.

We jumped into a taxi to head to our hotel and I asked the driver what language they spoke here. Brugge is close to the border with the Netherlands so they speak Dutch, English and German. He told us that Dutch is basically a mixture of German and English, and there wasn't much, if any, French spoken in Brugge. This did surprise me a little as I thought Belgium was a pseudo-French country, it appears I was very wrong.

The drive to our hotel in Brugge was pleasant. Brugge is a small circular town surrounded by a moat which likely served them very well a few hundred years ago. There are also a few canals running through the town. These days a "new bitumen road" rings around the town and moat, but to get into the town proper you then cross one of the bridges over the moat and head into the cobblestoned road area of the old town.

It was a nice 10 minute trip along the cobblestoned road to our hotel in the middle of Brugge. We arrived very early at our hotel without any prior notice but they took it in their stride and let us just drop our bags in the bar area of the hotel and then we headed out to explore the town of Brugge.

We were given a map by the hotel concierge and some basic instructions to find our way to the Market Square, the centre of town. With my innate Leyland Brother DNA I'm usually very good at waundering around places and getting my bearings but Brugge had me running round in circles well and truly. After about 15 minutes we finally figured out that I was reading the map incorrectly and with a few adjustments we were all sorted and on our way to the Market Square. Most of the roads in Brugge are like you see in the movies when they show you a small European town. All the roads were cobblestoned and just wide enough for one car to drive through.

Our first stop was, yep you guessed it, the Post Office. We've spent the better part of a week now trying to post my skis back to Australia! The girl at the Post Office was very helpful and while she said they certainly couldn't send the skis themselves she recommended the DHL courier company and found their phone number for us. We've now resigned ourselves to carrying the skis to atleast Paris ... hopefully we can find a courier more easily there in a big city.

Once we were finished at the post office it was about lunch time. The Market Square is ringed by old Belgian restaurants and cafes and huge buildings with big spires, clocks and bell towers. We waundered around the square perusing the menus of the restaurants and finally just settled on one as all their menus were very similar serving the traditional Belgian delicacies. Mariya and I both ordered cherry beers, unique to Belgium, and they came out in a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Apparently sunlight reacts with cherry beer and the bottle needs to be covered in paper to stop this reaction so as not to detract from the flavour of the beer. This is by far the best beer I have ever tasted, it's a very sweet beer with a strong cherry flavour and at 6% alcohol it wouldn't take many beers to knock your block off. For lunch we both ordered the 16 Euro Meal Deal which included a starter, main and dessert. Mariya had a prawn cocktail for her starter, a flemish beef stew for her main (which is like a steak and guiness stew) and then a chocolate mousse for dessert. I went with a cheese croquet to start, Waterzooi of Chicken for my main (basically a chicken thigh cooked in a cream sauce with potatoes, carrot and onion) and chocolate mousse for dessert as well.

After lunch we were off to the Belgian Chocolate Museum (Choco-Story!), our motivation for visiting Brugge in the first place! What can I say, is there truly a better place on earth than one that dedicates itself to the cataloguing and worship of the almighty chocolate?! This is an experience that everyone should have, from beginning to end it was a fun and tasty learning experience ... mmm geschmackt. As Mariya has said, the museum basically catalogues the history of chocolate from it's humble beginnings in the 1400's with the Mayans (and even records as early as 600BC!) up to the present day with the Belgians proudly demonstrating their international dominance in this field. It was a wonderful experience and we took many photos as usual, these will obviously arrive on Mariya's facebook in the near future.

We then headed home to start organising the next leg of the trip, our visit to the Trappist Monk Monestary in Orval. After some struggling for accommodation in Paris and in a little town near Orval, finally a few hours later we came out winners. So with our next few days of travel and accommodation sorted we decided to head back out for a nice Belgian meal for dinner, the priority being Belgian Waffles of course! How could we come to Belgium and not have the waffles?!

We found a cosy restaurant and settled in for a feed. We decided to try the other flavoured Belgian beer and it turned out to be a Raspberry beer (framboise beer?), this was nowhere near as good as the cheery beer but Mariya loved it. For dinner we both gravitated towards the seafood. We've both been on a diet of mostly beef and pork (with some chicken) and haven't had seafood over the month. I went with Scampi Maison (prawns of the house) which was a really nice prawn curry, surprisingly close to a panang. Mariya ordered the crumbed fish (plaice) which she loved as well. For dessert I had the BelgianWaffles (duh, obviously, we are in Belgium after all) with Vanilla Icecream and Chocolate topping. Om nom nom nom nom nom. Mariya had Crepes Suzette which were very nice too.

That brought our day in Brugge to an end, a very different side to Belgium that we both thought was much nice than Brussels. We could easily spend a few days in Brugge in the future.