Bruges, Brugge, Bruges!

You may be wondering why the title has two different words in it: Bruges and Brugge. Well, yesterday (Saturday) Grace and I went on another little day adventure to Bruges, Belgium, or Brugge if you are referring to the city in Flemish! Flemish is one of the three official languages in Belgium (along with French and English). Bruges is also the name of a town in France. So this entire week Grace, my mother, and I have been trying to figure out what the weather will be like in “Bruges” (forgetting to include the country) and were very confused when a town in France kept popping up. However, by Friday, we realized the difference and began looking at the correct city.

Bruges was BEAUTIFUL. It’s known as the “Venice of the North” and while we really only saw about three canals, it was still just a beautiful, quaint, beautiful town. It also snowed the entire time there, which would have been so romantic and even more beautiful, if I had not forgotten gloves and a thicker scarf and a hat.

Casual canals

Our day started at 10:30, which was our first train from Arras to Lille Flanders. Then we had to find the Lille Europe train station, and take another train to Brussels, Belgium where we had another train to Bruges where we arrived at 2:00 in the afternoon. Bruges is located in the north of Belgium, relatively close to The Netherlands. This proximity to The Netherlands would explain the amount of Flemish we saw throughout the city. Grace and I had been mistaken to think that French would be the most prominent language, and this mistake became very evident at the train station where nothing was translated into French, and we had no idea if we were looking at the list of departing trains or not. Don’t worry, we figured it out! It was definitely interesting though trying to decide whether or not to use English or French first with anyone we came across, and most people who approached us spoke initially in Flemish (until the bewildered and confused looks on our faces prompted them to talk either in French or English).

Flemish!

English!

French!

We had another one of our days where we just explored the city by walking around without any set plans, and this time without a map. However, we were able to easily find the historic city center where there were several tourist attractions in addition to the traditional and interesting architecture. I absolutely adore this city; it’s literally the embodiment of the image that pops into your head when reading a story that describes a quaint northern European village. The buildings were not crazy tall, everything was brick and cobblestones, and the architecture was very quaint and village-like. It’s comparable to the beauty of Strasbourg and I loved it just as much as Strasbourg.

Horse-drawn carriage rides were er'rywhere

Our first major event was buying traditional Belgium “frites,” or French fries, in the Historic Centre. They were delicious, which sounds terrible because it was technically “fast food,” but despite that, and maybe working with the fact that Grace and I had not had real fries in so long, they were amazingly delicious. My fingers were so frozen when paying for them, however, my fine motor skills were embarrassing and I’m sure I came off as the typical American tourist. Ah, well.

Historic Centre

We then went to the Salvador Dali EXPO in the same Historic Centre. This little gallery exhibited just Dali sketches and sculptures, but they were the most intriguing sketches I have ever looked at, which was surprising because I am not a huge fan of sketches. However, Dali is an amazing artist, and I won’t ramble too much about art, but each sketch and concept varied so much it was crazy to think they were all created by the same man. Grace and I commented on this a lot, in addition to the occasional, “I wonder what he was on when he sketched this series?” Overall though, we loved this museum and even bought the original museum’s poster.

Kind of looks like the Maryland flag, doesn't it?!

Chocolate was our next goal, and oh, did we succeed. Last year in French 202, I had to give a presentation on a Belgium brand of chocolate and the one that I had chosen (Guylian Belgian Chocolate) specialized in chocolate seashells. We ended up finding a shop near the main canal and I was able to buy my chocolate seashells while Grace had bought liquor-flavored truffles. For those of you wondering, they. Are. All. Delicious. I have not been able to keep myself from eating the chocolate and had to hide the bag in my closet to get them out of sight. We had to force ourselves back into the freezing cold weather at that point with the intention of finding a café-like place where we could order this special kind of hot chocolate. What is this? Mrs. Jarman had told me about this when she came to visit: apparently, you choose white, dark, or milk chocolate hot chocolate, and they bring you a bowl of hot milk with a separate dish of chips of whichever kind of chocolate you choose, and you pour the chocolate chips into the milk while whisking, and you create your own hot chocolate. By the time we found a shop that advertised hot chocolate, we were so cold we decided to go in to warm up and they had the prepared hot chocolate. It was delicious still and came with two pieces of chocolate that were amazing and I even bought MORE chocolate from this place and (hopefully) entertained the owner with my own form of Frenglish. As you can see, chocolate is VERY important in Belgium, and it may be fun/interesting to see how many times “chocolate” is in this paragraph alone.

All of my chocolates...

I absolutely adored Bruges/Brugge, and we definitely had a very fun, freezing, exhausting, interesting, and delicious day in this beautiful historic city!!