Our Last Days in Belgium

They really snuck up on us this time. I don’t know where the last week went!

On saturday night Inne and I cooked a Thai feast. It was excellent. I can’t remember the names of everything we made though… There where two noodle dishes, a yellow curry with jasmin rice, asian greens and chicken satay with peanut sauce and baby cucumber salad. The photo doesn’t so it justice at all!
Mmmm-mm! There was way too much food!

That day we also finished painting the doors upstairs using crazy thai paintbrushes because we ran out of normal ones and had no turpentine to clean the others (Mie accidentally bought oil based paint). But they look cool, all in different shades of blue.

On Sunday we packed our bags. I can’t say I’m getting any better at it… God knows how its going to fit on a plane again. Davids really good at it though so hopefully he will help! I guess the fact I shrunk a load of his clothes in the dryer works to his favour in that case :/

We spent the rest of the day hanging out and I had a couple of skype dates. When it came to saying goodbye Mie gave us one of her lovely bowls! And Belgian chocolate! Its so sweet of her, and it was one of my favourites, I wonder if she knew…

We went with the girls to Louven, where they live and study, for our last night. It was funny visiting student accommodation again, it reminded me of my friends back in England. They live in a huge house, with 20 students! Its actually two houses that have been merged together… It was really cool, Coco came too and we drank belgian beer and chatted away. Inne told us about this bar where you get a boiled egg with your drink. We convinced Eirin to come too, even though she was in her pyjamas, but it turned out it was closed :( but we still had a fun night!

The next day Inne didn’t have to go to university until the afternoon so she gave us a tour of Louven :) Its a really pretty town. I’m going to miss the funny belgian houses. She took us to the university library which apparently is in the top 10 most beautiful libraries. I can believe that.

We went inside and it was like being in Hogwarts! With all the arched ceilings and the zig zagging stair cases which unfortunately didn’t move :(

One of the studying rooms. Unfortunately tourists aren’t allowed to go on the balconies…

Hiking up to the asian library…

Admiring the old books. Some were huuuge!

Spiral staircase reinforcing the Hogwarts feel ;) You have to book to go up it to the bell tower though…

Model of said tower. Isn’t it beautiful? People don’t have the patience for building things like this anymore…

Back outside, Inne showed us around the city centre which is also full of intricate buildings.

It was great having Inne with us, she’s so friendly and full of life. She gave us a great tour.

This street is literally all bars, one after another. Its called the longest bar in europe. And this photo is just a bit of it! At the bottom is a school!

We walked through a garden to the canal.

Where Inne told us how she and a friend floated around the city on a blow up bed. They plan to do it again once it gets warm and there are a bunch of other people who want to too. It sounds like such fun (Miranda reference ;p).

We headed home for sandwiches via this village which is inside the city!

And secret short cut ;)

We reached the clock just in time to see the little guy hitting the bell!

After sandwiches in Inne’s tiny garden it was time to get the train to Brussels and then the bus to Paris. Inne gave me a book for the journey.
I’ve finished it already, its a great book! Such a beautiful story.

We got the megabus for just over 10€ each. I had faith it would be a good journey, the last megabus I got in England was great! This one wasnt. It was super old and absolutely packed with people coming from Amsterdam. The couple in front of us kept chewing each others faces and the girl behind had her feet in my chair. Needless to say it was a relief to get off 4.30 hours later….

Ghent

We both really liked Ghent. Its a university city so its full of students on bikes. Really full. There are literally bikes everywhere! Its also like a huge real Bruges. By real I mean lived in. Not that people don’t live in Bruges, but it doesn’t feel like it, its like walking around a huge museum. Where as Ghent feels like a working, breathing city.

Its full of canals, ponds and gardens.

And ducks. Sometimes also found outside of the gardens! Just after we took this picture she proceeded to cross the road, startling many drivers and almost giving me a heart attack!

It has an actual castle! Its pretty small but still impressive. We where going to go inside but it was expensive and we weren’t mad about seeing a torture museum…

The Use-it map really hypes up the street art in Ghent, every street with graffiti is marked with a little spray can and they go on about how arty the town is. Needless to say we had expectations. Not massive ones, but we expected to see some good stuff. Especially on the street where its “tolerated”.

Said street:

And the photo makes it look better than it is! Just tags all over the place, some aren’t even attempts at looking good. Its a real shame, I have always thought that given the space and acceptance street artists can thrive and beautiful walls are the result. Not that it doesn’t work elsewhere that is. I wonder if its so bad here because its right next to a school so there is no respect and people gave up on making an effort. But thats not really an excuse either.

But it was enough of an excuse for us to persevere. We decided to trek to the industrial area across the bridge to see an abandoned factory which Use-it suggests as the perfect place to begin a graffiti walk featuring some of Belgians best street artist.

What a…..shame! At least there where some ok ones but nothing extrodinary. Hardly worth putting on a map!

We gave up on street art and went to the textile museum instead. Its a cool muesum, and only costs 2€ for under 25s. There is a good balance between general Belgian life through the ages and the evolution of textile production.

The only trouble was that the English guide was a bit out of date, it referred to parts that must not exist any more and left out others. But it wasn’t too bad on the first floor. But in the other floors had a different layout, more random, instead of a set path. One floor was kind of interactive with personal messages placed next to objects or pieces of writing describing working during the industrial revolution. Matching what goes with what was so dificult, and some stories seemed to continue through the exhibition… Its not the same looking through a book for the information…

Davids highlight:

We couldn’t really get a good photo because of the reflection from the glass, check out the jelly mould though! If you can spot it… And the piping bag!

We reached the end of the production of cotton as we know it!

On another note: 17th century hot chocolate ROCKS! Its tiny (my cup) but so incredibly delicious! David had a mixture of white and dark chocolate, a bit too sweet for my taste, his super cool mug kept it hot for so long we strated using my empty one to scoop bits out!

We walked to the various towers of Ghent… This one had just been through 50 years of renovations.

This one is paired with the controversial modern barn.

And this one will have to be for another time.

We where both pretty tired and decided to head back to the train station via the red light district – We had never been to one and were curious. I already knew I wouldn’t really like it, but it was horrible! So sad, all these beautiful girls, probably my age, behind glass. Well, for sale! Some just sat on stools, others chatted together, some made an effort and danced others just smoked and looked bored. I couldn’t look any of them in the eye, I could hardly look at all. A bit of a downer to end our day on…

A Day in Brussels

The other reason I have been so absent is that I really didn’t feel like writing this post. I’m not entirely sure why.
Maybe because I wasn’t in the best of moods that day.
Maybe because Brussels just didn’t inspire me to write.
So I decided I just wouldn’t, I mean, why write a post just for the sake of it? It would be crap most likely. But whenever I thought about writing about something else I would remember little things that happened in Belgium that I want to tell you. Weird right?

It’s not that Brussels isn’t a nice city. In fact it was nicer than I expected seeing as even the use-it map said its ugly!
Ok sure, its not the most beautiful city. Its a bit of a mix match of massive modern buildings, old belgian ones and just normal city flats and stuff. Which we conveniently missed in out in our photos ;)

We actually pre planned some of our day!
We did the european walk which led around various massive buildings. This was the first:

It was quite a cool walk actually because it took us through a variety of places so we saw real life in Brussels not just all the touristy center.

This is the square of the poorest area in Brussels (according to our map that is).

A cool painting on a building. Its a really multi cultural city, I guess most European capitals are though.

We stopped for a mini picnic in this lovely little park. Apparently this little lake or giant pond was made to attract posh people to the area and all the houses had to have really nice facades making it all really beautiful. There were loads of birds! And people brought all sorts of leftovers for them. You can see the spaghetti in one of the photos. Actually we have seen this kind of thing else where in Belgium, animals in towns for people to give their leftovers to. In De Haan there where goats and rabbits!! Literally at the edge of a park! How great is that? Assuming they were happy… They had a reasonable amount of space and plenty of food…

Anyway back to Brussels! Heres the park and my new feathery friends.

On our walk through the posh neighbourhood we saw one of Horta’s buildings. Not the most amazing one but the others where far away :(

The posh houses:

And a particularly funky one :)

Another important building. People in suits make all sorts of decisions about us in there.

Brussels has an arc! Like in Paris and Berlin :)

With a mini castle in the garden!

Ok, I’m totally in love with Belgian architecture. I took way to many photos of houses! Who says Brussels is ugly!

Tadaaaa the european parliment! It is a pretty cool building. You can go inside but we were already 3 hours into our time in Brussels so we didn’t.

From here we walked literally across the city centre to the other side to visit the use-it headquarters which were closed lunch! So we found a french fries place and headed back once once it was opened. We collected a map for Ghent (the next city we will visit) and Porto (where David is from) which I plan to use when we are there :)
Use-it is a Belgian company and all their maps are free!

We spent the afternoon wandering around, David was blown away by the central square. Personally I thought it was a bit over the top. So much gold!

Then we met up with Inne, the eldest daughter and went for waffles! In a little grandma cafe, it was excelent! So simple yet so good. Apparently only the tourist pile their waffles with cream and strawberries and whatever else they can get their hands on.

Then we decided to follow the flow of tourist towards Belgian pride and joy: some strange statue of a peeing child. Weird hey? Can you see it?

There are all sorts of stories about it, my favourite is that a father had lost his child. He declared that he missed him so much that once he found him he would make a statue of him doing whatever he was doing when found… But it still seems like an awful lot of fuss about nothing. They make outfits for him too. I was disappointed he wasn’t wearing one at the time.

Another highlight of the day was discovering a lego version of the palace! Unfortunately it was like 14€ to see the rest of the exhibition but we were happy with our free bit :D

Oh, and climbing a massive car park for a free panoramic view of Brussels, there are huge benefits of visiting cities with students ;) it was getting dark by this point so we couldn’t see an awful lot and it was so incredibly cold being up high!

Close by there was this super cool errr… Interactive sculpture? It described how glaciers break and as you walked through you can hear all the different sounds they make, something to do with pressure… It was accompanied with information which I have conveniently forgotten. Still, what a great thing to have in a random square!

We still had a while until our train so David suggested walking to Brussels Midi station instead of Central, then we would see some more if the city. The plan completely back fired as it started to rain, absolutely pouring it down! We eventually got there completely drenched and still had a 20min cold wait until our train….

A Feeble Excuse for not Blogging…

One of the reasons I have been so absent is that our iPad wouldn’t charge. Our cable is a bit worse for wear so I assumed that was the problem and tried charging my iPod using its cable in the mains adaptor. It also didn’t work. The we checked our travel adaptor and it worked with David’s phone. So the problem must be with the mains adaptor, which is a bummer because it must be the most expensive part! Then David found the fuse, which is covered so you can’t see if its broken, and we decided it must be that. He had heard the charger making a buzzing sound earlier and assumed it was just a bad connection…

It was Saturday afternoon so we couldn’t do anything straight away.
We used the last bit of battery to locate two electronic shops so we could get a new fuse. We would have to wait for monday though.

One of the shops was about 20 mins walk, the next would be another 15 or so.
When we got to the first one we discovered it no longer existed.
When we got to the second one it was closed on mondays.

Great.

We headed home, we knocked on an elevator company’s door on the way, maybe they would just give us one? No answer.
About half way home we saw a camera shop, so we crossed our fingers and went in. The lady said she didn’t have any and that if we went down the road we would find an electronics shop. We explained we had already tried, but it was closed. Oh no, she said, you need to go further, theres another one!

And so back we went.

The guy was very friendly and tested the part of the adaptor with the fuse. It worked. We hadn’t bought the rest so this just narrowed down the problem to being in the other side of the adaptor (the bit the usb plugs into).

Oh and in case your wondering, no you cant charge an iPad with a computer!

So we went home again. All the way up the same road.

We located an apple shop and David took the adaptor there.
40mins later he came back and said it worked!!!

Now all the parts had been individually tested! And they all work! Separately.

We figured it must be the cable. I mean, what else?! So we borrowed one of the chargers from the family here and plugged it in. Nothing. We decided to leave it whole we had lunch. Still nothing.

Back to the apple store. This time we took everything with us. The iPad, the cable, the mains adaptor and the travel adaptor. By now I was a little worried it was something wrong with the actual iPad…

The guy took our mains adaptor (the bit for usb) and slipped it into a european one (the mains part, they come apart) eliminating the travel adaptor, we wandered around the shop daydreaming about bamboo tablets (in my case that is) and 5 minutes later it had 2%!!

The guy explained that the problem must be the travel adaptor. That not enough energy was getting through to the iPad because it had so much to get through.
We bought a european charger, we could have got another travel adaptor I suppose, but we are going to be here a long time anyway and whats to stop it from happening again? (Eeerrrr, don’t buy travel adaptors in poundland!)

The weirdest thing is that the travel adaptor still works with everything else!! Why?

The Cakes and Desserts of Belgium

I have previously mentioned how Oostende is full of bakeries. As a result it seemed only fair to try some of these delicious looking cakes. I mean, we wouldn’t want to offend Belgium after all…

We have discovered that not only do the supermarkets also have great looking cakes, they are also reduced at the end of the day AND have free samples so we know they are good! There are free samples of things all over the shops, its amazing, from cakes (I walked in to find an whole birthday cake cut into bite sized pieces one day) to morsels of grilled meat to beer!

Our first expedition resulted in us choosing the oddest looking cakes we could find.

This one is a bit blurier, I couldn’t wait to try one!

So the pink ones turned out to be a light sponge filled with cream and wrapped in marzipan, but not the disgusting almond extract filled marzipan we are used to, one that actually tasted of almonds – shock horror! It was very good, but quite sickly, its lucky we shared with everyone :)

The second was really good. Kind of a set spiced custard, but with much more body than a normal one as it didn’t have anything else like pastry to support it… It was still cold from the fridge and disappeared pretty quick!

Mie’s Belgian Bread Pudding

As we have bread everyday, sometimes even twice, a fair amount of ends and stale forgotten pieces accumulate which Mie uses for a bread pudding. It is similar to our bread and butter pudding, but instead of buttering and positioning the bread we just ripped it all up and put it into a big pan with a load of milk, two eggs, sugar, cinnamon and dried cranberries then cook it for a while until it thickens.

Then it all gets poured into a baking pan, some sugar sprinkled on top and baked at about 180 degrees celsius for about 40 mins or until the kitchen smells delicious.

I don’t know why we fuss around layering pieces of bread…
Mie used all sorts of left overs too, brown, rye, seedy and nutty. It all added to it. So think twice next time you through bread away!

Cherry Pie

We went to the shop for speculoo ice cream but they where all out :( to soften my disappointment we got a cherry pie instead. It wouldn’t normally be our top choice but it was reduced and there wasn’t much else…
Man it was good! I hoped and hoped there would be custard under the cherries but David was convinced there wouldn’t be. My hoping paid off :D the inly downside is the belgians crazy cake-like pastry. Its so thick, soft and filling!

To be continued…. ;)

A Trip Across the Harbour and a Night Out with the Family

One afternoon David and I got the little free ferry across the harbour to the slightly wilder side of Oostende.
Its where the fishing boats are and the fish is sold.

There are clear reminders of war here.

Including a bunker built by Napolean!

Which has been decked out with a restaurant. I mean, can you think of a nicer place to eat an overpriced dinner?

We went inside, a bit, because to go any further we would have to pay and David became very disheartened with the fake coin machine. It wasn’t one of the squashing ones :(

It was a nice day, so we wandered over the sand dunes and then checked out the fishing boats. I think somebody was getting a bit nostalgic…

On friday night we came here again as part of a demonstration against the proposal of pulling down the fish market to build more flats or holiday lets or something.

It would be a shame, Oostende has so little heritage left, you would have thought they would want to preserve as much as possible.

It took us a little while to actually find the demonstration, which is never a great start… There were quite a few people though, I’m not great at guessing, but I would say over a hundred. Which on reflection, isn’t that many really…

It was funny.
We all stood around for the speeches surrounded by people with glow sticks, lanterns and fire tourches. Which were almost burnt out by the end of the speeches. Then a marching band appeared! It drummed away and we watched, a photo was taken and then they walked off drumming until someone pointed out that perhaps we should follow them. We marched around, through the big corridor of said building, which smelt strongly of fish and amplified the drumming. I can’t blame Jorick for getting a head ache. We came to the end of our walk at a stool selling delicious fried fish simply on a bit of bread. Some kind of sole I think, there were no bones and mine was a little crispy which I liked :)

The next part of the evenings plan was to see a band at a little gallery near home but we turned up and it looked closed. Jorick celebrated, until we realised it wasn’t. Then there were no tickets left anyway, so he celebrated again. We wandered into town and place after place were closed. By now it became quite a joke that Jorick had put some spell on them. He wanted to go home.

But we battled on to the city centre, which isn’t far at all, like 10 to 15 mins walk, and found a great little bar with a huge mixture of music. Ranging from Manu Chau to Tom Odell. The whole family seem to know all the words to every song! Especially the daughters. They battle for the names of artists and often yell out names in unison.

It was such a nice atmosphere with everyone chatting away and guessing songs, which David and I were hopeless at, some dancing and lots of laughing.

It was about time we tried some Belgian beer. We already had french fries. Which are called that because apparently frying is also called frenching. Huh, spellcheck doesn’t agree that is a word… Well, thats what a belgian told me anyway!
Those who know me, yes because its not just friends and family following my blog anymore ;) will know I’m not a fan of beer. Which is to put it nicely. So Kris, the dad, chose me a girly cherry beer, which was pretty good, kind of similar to cider but more err… Full bodied? I don’t know how to explain it. David tried a few different beers, everyone did, like trying wines, everyone takes sips of each others and talks about them. They all come in different glasses, some remarkably like wine glasses down to the tall thin stem. I was surprised to find I quite liked a couple of beers. They are much higher in alcohol than what we are used to in the UK and Portugal, at about 9% and don’t make me feel so bloated. Some are even kind of creamy on the palet. There are hundreds of beers here, god knows how people can remember them. Then again, no different from wine I guess…

The Exhibition Opening

Its been a nice week, with all the family around bringing the house alive with laughter and preparations for the opening of the new exhibition.
The opening coincides with some kind of art festival here in Oostende, which sends people around all the local galleries. Entertainment is chosen by the organisers and we ended up with a poet, who apparently is quite well known, and a band. That was all we knew. Mie expected it to be a busy night.

So excitement was in the air as we deep cleaned and stretched the gallery into the living room and dinning room as more and more art arrived. We arranged shelves to avoid people wandering into the kitchen during the exhibition. David still found one though, a lady who asked him something in dutch and then said ‘Its a nice house’ and wandered off.

Christophe Deroo’s paintings slipping into the dining room

A variety of sculpture in the gallery

Mie Ghesquiere and Mieke Recour’s mobile which we helped put up by balancing on tables. I like this piece, its like the felt balls are breaking through the ceramics.

My favourite piece is this one by the street artist Sander Anseeuw. Its such a nice composition between the boards and the spray painting itself. I would love to have a go at spray painting, it must be so difficult to get this kind of detail though…

Here is another of Mie’s works. She is very influenced by the sea and creates all these beautiful delicate bowls and tea light holders but they are in another two exhibitions as well…

There really were plenty of people! We were in charge of drinks, red, white or sparkling wine, orange juice, still or sparkling water – much more than anything I’ve seen at any other opening, even Tate Modern weren’t so genrous!

A couple of days before, I made green tea eclairs, which were delicious but not as strong in flavour as I expected. I had leftover egg whites so wanting to experiment more with the flavour I made a huge batch of meringues. Chocolate, vanilla, coconut and of course green tea. Which were amazing! I’m not usually much of a fan of meringue as its just so sweet but the green tea compliments the sweetness perfectly!

What was left of them after we ‘tried’ them were scattered around in bowls alongside nuts and those funny brown, salty sticks.

It was a long night, but we had fun chatting, drinking wine and as people started to mingle away, we sat down to a HUGE Chinese takeaway.

As for the entertainment, I didn’t see the poetry, but judging from the amount of signed books afterwards, it must have been good. I found the band a little disappointing though, they looked so interesting. The four of them all with different sized saxophones ranging from a tiny weeny one to the really big one. I thought ‘my mum is much better’, even just by her self. But as they only played two songs before rushing to the next gallery there wasn’t much time to judge.

Life in Oostende

In Belgium dutch and french are spoken, so there tends to be a mixture of both scattered around. We are in the dutch half but french still filters in, so Oostende is also spelt with one ‘o’ but its such a novelty starting a word with two I much prefer it!

On our very first day we had a good walk around the seaside city but I never got around to writing about it. Too busy reading in my spare time. I finished The Great Gatsby and devoured Cross by James Patterson shortly after, which I found here, now I have discovered youtube is full of audiobooks which makes painting much more fun but has also seeped into spare time. Leaving very little for actual writing.

So, Oostende hey? Well, David is very pleased to be back in civilisation. He can pop out the door for biscuits again! I do miss the contact with nature but its lovely being by the sea again, even if its cold, windy and one can’t stay out for long!

The city was badly damaged by the war and as a result there aren’t many old buildings left but we picked up a map for a trail of the nicest ones. It made a nice walk taking us around quite a bit of the centre and its surrounding area, giving us a sense of our where abouts.

Its a funny place, full of hotels and other big buildings and blocks of flats, with beautiful traditional buildings squeezed in between. Sometimes you just catch one unexpectadly…

The bright red thing is part of a huge installation by a Belgian artist.

But there are other streets that are almost intact which are like wandering into a new town.

I find them so elegant, so tall and thin with their elaborate roofs and balconies. I’ve done a couple of line drawings of them and hope to get some more done. Maybe I’ll even post them on here ;)

Sometimes its hard to tell when one ends and another begins. Can a house really be that thin?!

They also seem to get away with any colour!

Its refreshing being by the sea again, the other day we caught some good weather and made the most of it by sunbathing.
In our coats.

Another high light of our walks through Oostende has to be pressing our faces agains every patisserie we come across. And there are many. The Belgians like their sweets!
In fact they have sweet stuff for breakfast. And I’m not talking about gacky cerials. More along the lines of freshly baked bread and a wide selection of spreads. At home we have white chocolate spread, nutella, dark chocolate and orange “fondant” spread, chocolate sprinkles for toast and a variety of jams. As if thats not special already, on Sunday we have a selection of pastries too :)
Back to the cakes though…

So far we have only tried one, a sort of extra custardy rice pudding-y tart, or flan? It was good, but the pastry is a bit different, lighter and less buttery, a little sickly – it didn’t have the crisp crumbliness of british pastry. But the filling was yummy!
The selection of bread is crazy too, I never know which to choose!

Speaking of shopping, yesterday I volunteered to go shopping for lunch and dinner seeing as I was cooking. David and I had been into the supermarkets a couple of times and it seemed pretty straight forward, after the Czech Republic everything seems much easier!
And it was. I didn’t buy liquid yoghurt instead of milk for example.
But it must have taken me about 40mins and I only had a basket! Sure I got distracted here and there. Like in the waffle isle!! Can there even be that much difference between them?! According to Jorick they are all gross so we haven’t attempted them when there are fresh ones being made everywhere outside.

Or in the spread section where we discovered they have made a spread out of lotus speculoo biscuits, imagine if there was a digestive biscuit spread? Apparently this came about because so many people would dip the biscuit in coffee and then spread it on their bread or make sandwiches out of them! The guy who came up with the idea claimed he was tired of the biscuits falling out of the sandwhich.
Now there are chocolate versions (of course) and crunchy and extra crunchy (maybe some people miss the biscuits falling out?) among others.
As for the lotus speculoo, it doesn’t stop there, you can get big ones and mini ones, you can get ice cream and cake! Did I mention they are my favourite biscuits?! I can’t wait to try the icecream!!

I was also baffled by the amount of different creams which I had no idea how to distinguish, except from the cooking ones (there was a pot on the carton) and the normal ones (strawberries). What were all the others?! And they were so expensive too! I went for a strawberry carton, even through it was for curry, and it seemed just fine :)

That night, last night, influenced by the wonderful parcel I got from mum and my brother which included curry spices, I made a feast of dahl, butter chicken, pea and cauliflower curry, naan and rice. Mmm-mm! I had been craving curry for so long!

And the family? Well, we are very much settled in now. The dad has come back from Thailand and we have met the eldest sister too, they are both the most down to earth and seem to pull the family together in easy conversations over dinner and lots of laughs!
She is studying geography and is in her last year of her degree. She has this enthusiasm and love for life which you can’t help joining in with. I can converse quite easily with her and we cooked together for her friends who were very friendly too. The rest of the family went out except Eurick and we all had a nice time eating and chatting away. Oh and she likes the Cat Empire!

Overall I feel much more part of day to day life and at ease with the family which is what is most important to me. Its kind of the point of Workaway.
We have a big gallery open event this weekend so for the next few days there will be lots of cleaning and art moving I should think…

When in Bruges…

We are just 15 mins by train from Bruges so we made the most of a not so nasty day to visit the much celebrated town.

On hearing we were going to Bruges one friend warned me is terribly expensive, another that its excellent for second hand stuff, much cheaper than in England! Seeing as we are travelling with stuffed backpacks, neither made much difference. But we did find a great second hand, errr… Building full of stuff! From sofas to sketches! As always I looked for a glass for Clare but came up empty handed… Who would have thought with this selection!

As for expensive… Check out this box of chocolates!

There were so many chocolate shops. Even next to each other! I have no idea how to distinguish which was better than the other, well without buying some from everyone and rolling to the winner! I assumed most of them are tourist traps though, according to our Use-it map, in high season there are much more tourists than locals here. They bike them down as a sport.

In fact we did see someone get hit by a cyclist, he literally went up in the air, but they were both fine.

It is a lovely place, full of little canals and cute houses. Its curious that tourism has grown here through critasicm. First in 1892 when its described as ugly, poor and dark in a popular book called ‘Bruges la Mort’ which brings romantic tourists pouring in. And again in the 2002 movie ‘in Bruges’ where Colin Farrel describes it as a ‘shithole’.

Its a shame that quite a lot of renovations and maintenance was going on while we were there but I guess they have to make the most of the low season to get it out of the way…

We spent most of the day walking around as we always do, but we did go up the tower. You know the one were the big shoot out is in the film? They must have had a hell of a time running up and down during the filming! Just as you think its got to be close to the top and that the stairs can’t possibly get steeper. They do. And again!

On the way up there are little rooms you can go into with benches, information and artifacts. This was the treasury, there are 10 keys to this gate!

We eventually reached the top and it was really worth it! Much better than the Ferris Wheel on Vienna – I think it was the movement that got me. The views were amazing…

Getting back down was almost harder than the climb up! Everyone clung to the rope!

David added a squashed coin to his collection :)

And a paper artist cut my portrait! The likeness was good, it only took him a couple of minutes, if that. Not even long enough for me to feel uncomfortable! Its a shame we didn’t get a photo of the final piece..

We wandered through the chocolate streets pointing out the more extravagant ones and found a biscuit shop where we got a delicious palmier.

Next we stumbled across a sweet shop that made their lollies in front of the public! Appaerntly, using very traditional methods…

It was so sweet we had share it and even then we couldn’t finish it!

On our walk back to the train station we finally saw swans! The map kept joking about how they are everywhere but we were yet to see any. This made up for it, I don’t think I have ever seen so many in one place!

There were ducks too, and this funny bird… I’m not sure what he is though…