Day 33 – Bruges

Travelling from Paris to Bruges

The Parisian roads are quiet early on the weekends so we headed off as soon as we could to make good time to Belgium.   Although it was chilly, after a short distance we had sunny, clear skies above.  Where was the horrible weather we kept being told about by our families back in Australia?

The trip was uneventful so it was around lunchtime that we arrived in the beautiful medieval city of Bruges.  After a few weeks in France and arriving in Belgium, what was our first thought?

Beer!

Although it was tricky to find because pointy buildings kept getting in the way, we finally found Staminee De Garre and sat down for some good Belgian beer and what I thought was going to be a light lunch.

First the beers, with free cheese which had a certain person clapping.

Then my “pate sandwich” arrived, with me thinking it was going to be a nice light thing…what a mistake that was.  It was goddamn enormous with the bread slices about twice the size of our standard ones.  I think 12 cows died to make the pate.

It was very tasty at least.  Such a large sandwich required further liquidationary refreshment so…more beer!

We were due to check into our apartment, so at this point we stood up and realised that maybe we should have stuck to the one beer each.  Our host Francis had some very happy tenants checking in.  The three-storey house, called Lady Lace, was great so once we got ourselves in order we relaxed (sobered up) a little and headed off into Bruges to check out more of the sights.

The Belfry tower in the center square is one of the first things you see when entering the medieval section of Bruge and at night is very nicely lit up.

We wandered around a little more, it’s a very pretty little city with plenty of streets full of shopping.  Dinner time arrived so…more beer!

We went to ‘t Brugs Beertje as they seemed to have a good selection of beers…around 300.  We managed to stick to just choosing one each this time, both were very interesting but the one on the right, Malheur 12, was damn nice.

After that we wandered a little more before bed, the canals going through the town made for some nice sights with the right lighting.