In order for it to make sense, it's probably a good idea to read part one first:
click here
...After dinner, we walked out of the resturant into the snow! it hadn't yet started piling up on the ground, but it was falling quite heavily. we got to our room and took some video of the snow falling on street. unfortunately we didn't bring any toothpaste, the hotel didn't have any and all the shops were closed so we just brushed our teeth with the toothbrushes and agreed we'd go out first thing in the morning to get toothpaste.
Debbie did some experementation with different settings on the camera:
We turned on the TV and saw a bit of Harry Potter except it was all in french, on another channel was cliffhanger - I never realised that Sylvester Stalone spoke french either.... We ended up finding Catch me if you can in English and watched that.
We had dificulty with the bed. the springs weren't very good or something. I spent the first few hours squirming arround. I felt as though I was on a slope and I didn't have very much room, being right on the edge of the bed and constantly rolling in towards the middle. Finnaly I sat up and saw that debbie was practically sleeping right in the middle of the bed, so I woke her up and told her to go sleep on her side of the bed.. this fixed both the sleeping area and the slope problems and we both promptly went to sleep.
So we woke up bright and early on Tuesday morning... well, early at least. took a bit of video and some photos of the most beautiful city skyline that we'd ever seen:
We couldn't enjoy it for too long because we had to get to the tour place by 8:45am in order to be in time for our free tour of Gent and Brugge, The breakfast buffet at the hotel opened at 7am and the corner store opened at 8:30. so in a beautifully executed operation we dragged ourselves out of bed at 7:30, got ready and started eating by 8:00, I was standing at the door of the chemist when the owner came to unlock the door at 8:30, bought some toothpaste and got back to the hotel at 8:40, we cleaned our teeth and rushed to the tour place which was about 10 meters away from our hotel door (did I mention what an excellent location our hotel was in?) and got there right on the dot of 8:45 despite having a rotten night sleep. Which brings us to the Howie Associates London Branch Travel Tip number Two: A really full stomach is a good temporary cure for lack of sleep.
Pretty soon after we arrived at the tour place, an American couple and their son arrived also. At about 9:00, the lady from the tour place walked us to the bus, there were a couple of people waiting outside also. When we got to the bus, it was already half full, there was about 30 people in total. The tour guide came along, asking each of us which language we spoke, the majority was English and then suprisingly Spanish, so nearly everything he said from then on was first in english and then again in Spanish.
The bus started off and we got to see a lot of Brussels itself, from the city centre, to the CBD with modern buildings, to a bit of the residential area. the tour guide occasionally told us interesting, but not very memorable, facts about the city. on the way out of the city, we drove past Basilica Koekelberg (or "La basilique de Koekelberg") where they were having an expo of davinci's work - quite a beautiful church, and unfortunately we didn't have time to visit.
La Basilique de Koekelberg
There was heaps of snow on the ground, and being the first day that we'd ever seen snow we were absolutely mesmerised by it, we actually saw people making snow-men!
Well, after what seemed like a short trip we arrived at Gent. "this town puts the Gent back in Elegant" said the tour guide...
Basically gent is made up of a whole bunch of churches and beautiful buildings and a canal or two. it really is an elegant town. The tour guide took us past town hall and to one area where there were three large churches within about 100 meters of eachother. We went inside one (unfortunately we weren't able to take photos inside). it was absolutely amazing.
cool church:
Arround the back, behind where the pulpit would be was this amazing set of scupltures and behind that was a walkway that went entirely arround the back of the church. it contained little alcoves that had sculptures or paintings and sometimes crypts etc... very beautiful.
After this church, the tour guide said that we had some free time (about 1 hour) and then we had to all be back at the bus ready to go at 11:30. At this point Debbie and I started getting annoyed at eachother though - We wanted to see the castle and so I was walking fast so we could get to the castle and back in time and debbie was walking slow and taking video of everything.... it was frustrating for both of us. anyway, we did eventually make it to the castle and got back just in time.
other random churches and buildings:
us-shots:
one of my favorite shots of the whole trip:
Really cool looking castle:
Next stop was Brugge. Brugge is sort of like an island, surrounded by a moat and intersected by canals. apparently it's called the Venice of northern Europe. Well, it certainly was beautiful.
This time, there was basically a guided tour all the way so we stuck with the tour guide. It is really hard to describe the city, everything is beautiful. the city council a long while back made a restriction on building new buildings and it has really paid off. they get 3 million tourists a year comming through the town. I'm finding it really hard to describe the town because of the large number of beautiful old buildings. it was like the entire town was a meuseum, with cobbled streets literally everywhere (we didn't see even one bitchimen road), horse and carts clip clopping down the roads and swans floating peacfully on the canals.
I didn't get one decent shot of a swan.. they were all camera shy:
Our first stop was in a convent garden area,
there were signs up all arround the place requesting silence. Well, all our stomachs must have been growling too loudly so the tour guide took us to lunch. We had one hour to eat and the tour guide said that this place (a local pub/resturant) was the only place that could feed so many people within an hour.
They were certainly efficient at it. there was a set three-course menu as well as a more expensive normal menu. the difference in cost was really significant. one steak from the normal menu cost the same as a three course meal from the set menu. and so we ordered from the set menu. I had some vegetable soup and steak for the entree and main, debbie had sort of cheese cakes and a beef stew for hers. the menu only said "desert" which turned out to be chocolate mousse. (this is the same as the other resturant we went to the previous night, where it said "desert" and we got chocolate mousse also... we thought that perhaps it was a belgian thing).
So just before we ordered, the waiter asked us what we'd like to drink, and the tour guide happened to be walking past and said "the local beer is absolutely excelent", and so we ordered a local beer each.
We found out later that a large number of the belgian produced beers are actually brewed by monestaries (including the one we had which came from Abbaye de Leffe (the Abbey of Leffe)). back ages ago before they had propper sanitisation and clean water (we're talking hundreds of years back) beer and wine were the only germ free beverages available, and so it was the mandate of the monestaries to brew the beer to a certain standard (remember friar tuck from the robin hood story?). a tradition that has continued to this day dispite the water being clean. Belgium has over 400 brands of beer. some are fruity, some are spicy, they're all different and can vary in taste as much as a light white wine varies to a heavy red. ..and I bet you thought Australians liked beer eh? well, as the tourist guide said: "Australans like beer so much, you must have all been born in Belgium!".
random cool shot:
Next up was a church..
and in this one we were allowed to take photos so we did. inside was the only sculpture done by Michelangelo outside italy (Michelangelo was the orange one with the nunchucks) the "Madonna and child" which didn't really look all that much different from the other sculptures that we had seen through the other churches. There was also some monks doing their cool singing (debbie managed to catch both the sculpture AND the singing on video at the same time) and a very very extravagant Pulpit.
Pulpit:
A plaque an the wall said this about the pulpit:
"In earlier times, the Word of God was proclaimed from this pulpit, whose sides are decorated with pictures from the gospels and relevant texts. Below, Wisdom is symbolically depicted. The sounding-board is decorated with medalions of the four latin church fathers and crowned with a representation of truth."
We spent so much time looking at the sculpture and listening to the music and taking photos etc that we suddenly looked arround and our tour group had gone! we quickly ran out, but couldn't see them, and my sense of direction which had worked so well up until this point, failed me. so debbie suggested that we look at the map.... What a preposterous idea I thought initially! but it worked! and we found our tour group just about to cast off on a boat tour. We managed to hop on in time and we were treated to a mostly peacefull boat trip allong the canals. I say mostly peacful because the driver had this loud speaker that he used to tell us about stuff on the sides of the canal, he spoke perfect english and what sounded (to us) like perfect spanish, but the words sounded somewhat contrived, like we were listening to an advertisement for the city. We guessed that if you did 30 min boat tours all day every day, you'd end up saying the exact same thing every trip.
this building here:
can you see the round holes in the tower bits of the previous photo? these were for carrier pidgeons to enter.
originally, most of the buildings were built like this one: as was the style at the time in most of europe including London.
but due to what happened in 1666 in London, designs changed to using stone. this was the only wooden building that we saw in all of brugge.
After the boat tour (which finished at the same place it started) the tour group got the pleasure of seeing some lace being made by hand at a lace shop. It's quite facinating; the Lacer (a word we made up to indicate someone who maces lace) has a series of about 20 bobins that she weaved over and under eachother in an intricate pattern to create the lace. it must have taken years of practice to get to the level of skill and dexterity that she had. The technique must have been passed down as a tradition from mother to daughter for as long as Brugge has been making lace. Unfortunately, I couldn't help but thinking that it was a task that could easily be automated by a machine and done in a fraction of the time, with next to no skill.... but hey, I'm a computer programmer, what do I know about thousand year old traditions....
after that, we had 30 mins spare time where we could do what we like, the tour guide suggested either the main square or a really old pub, we'd be going through the main square later on anyway so we went to the pub to find a bathroom. We sat at the bar for a bit and the tour guide came up and we started chatting. Turns out he's actually french, but he speaks 10 languages fluently including Japanese. quite amazing really.
Afterwards we went to the main square for a bit where this massive bellfry is and then we all piled on a local bus to get back to the tour coach and then most people actually went to sleep on the coach during the ride home.
the belfry:
Debbie and I went straight back to the hotel after we arrived back in brussels. we were both hungry and tired, I said, let's just have a nap for 10 mins and so we both crashed on the bed. an hour later we got up and went out to the Grand Place again to find some food.
We walked arround the streets surrounding the Grand Place for a while, trying to decide what we wanted to eat. Finally we came across the oposite end of the alley way where we had eaten the Escargot the previous night. The first resturant had a very persuasive waiter out the front who asked if we spoke french or english. He enthusiasticly explained how good the menu is and how there was an open fireplace inside and a spare table next to it. We said that yes, it looked good, but we havn't seen all our options, we'll be back. he said that this is what everyone said and he'll give us a free glass of champaign each. so we said ok :-) the resturant turned out to be very nice. we got our free champaign and a seat next to the open fire. the food was very well cooked and came out quite quickly. I had fish soup for entree and salmon for main, debbie had prawns and steak. again, we got chocolate mousse for desert. the menu here was 18 euro each, but it was quite worth it. Halfway through the meal, a blak domestic cat, obviously owned by the manager of the store walked down the stairs and looked hopefully at us and spent the next few minutes moving between tables staring wishfully up at the diners.
Debbie made the observation that we were all being "categorized"
Now would be a great time to watch the second video. as with the other, you may want to hit pause and go make another cup of tea :-)
Andrew and Debbie Invade Belgium (the movie!) Part2
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