Chapter 4 (cont.)
08/24/2010
70 °F
Hello again!
Thank goodness I've been able to make frequent updates for the last few days of my trip. I was looking at my past posts and the Czech Republic was woefully underrepresented, so I vowed to blog up a storm during my time in Belgium.
Yesterday Charlène and I went to Bruges. We had a very lucky morning, having gotten a rather lazy (i.e. late) start, when we got to the train station in the nick of time to run to the train and hop on as the doors closed. We would have had to wait another hour for the next one, so it was some good karma that got us on the first train and on our way to Bruges.
It is one of the prettiest cities I've ever seen. It's called "Little Venice" because it is built around an intersection of several waterways, and it definitely lives up to the name. The whole place was absolutely charming, and Charlène and I decided it was a very happy city. It was also nice because even though there were tourists there, they weren't overwhelming the city like a plague.
The whole main city was accessible by foot and much smaller than we had originally thought, so we ended covering most of the main city in only a few hours. We arrived in the town square and decided to climb the Belfry that overlooks the city. A seemingly unending spiral staircase led to the very top, where we were blown about by strong winds as we looked out over the red roofs of the city. All in all it was a very successful climb, and our appetites were properly stoked afterwards, so we ate lunch in the town square.
We then walked around the many shops in the city, and I ended up buying an embarrassing amount of Belgian chocolate and assorted other sweets. There were an appalling amount of lace shops everywhere, as there were in Brussels (apparently Belgian lace is a big thing, which I didn't know), so after a while I began to feel a strong aversion to any sort of needlework, but hopefully that's just temporary.
Our next stop was one of the old churches, which was larger on the inside than it looked, and had beautiful, intricate tapestries and stained glass windows. There was also a giant organ that took up the whole back wall that was being played while we were there.
On the train on the way back I thought to myself that Bruges is a place I would very much like to see again. It had a very unique and friendly atmosphere and it was just so pretty.
At night we went to a movie (The Expendables- why, Sylvester Stallone, why?) in the main room of a big movie theater in Brussels that's decorated with all sorts of gold and fancy seats. It felt very important, and even though I was quite sleepy I forced myself to stay awake through the movie, not wanting to insult the grandeur of the room.
What a day it was! Bruges in the morning and a movie at night-- it doesn't get much better than that.
I'll write again soon!
Posted by dcarrillo 08/25/2010 02:45 Archived in Belgium
