Many lifetimes in one and a half days

On Sunday night (17 Sep), after the day in Mont Saint Michel, we made a mammoth drive for this journey from Normandy to Ostende in Belgium, our ultimate target being Bruges. It had taken us 7 days to get down here but only 7 hours to get back up (and beyond). You get an appreciation of both how small, but also how dense Europe is.
After a free park night in Ostende we drove 20k or so to Bruges, parked up and walked and walked, and what a magnificent walk.
There are many fantastic historic cities in the world of course, and Bruges has got to be very close to the top of the list. As a microcosm of Europe, it takes 20 minutes to walk through city centre, days to explore, but really reveals the lifetimes it took to develop.


Bruges had been a significant trading centre in Europe around the 14 – 16 centuries, the Venice of the North is the nickname (but I think that does not do justice to the uniqueness of Bruges), until the harbour silted up around the 16th century. This had a devastating effect and the town really went into stagnation. But for these brief few centuries some fantastic culture and building developed. We visited the belfry (366 steps to the top, although Tasha counted more) which offered commanding views across the rooftops of Bruges, the guild hall with an awe inspiring decorated main hall, the chocolate factory, an art gallery we a lot of 15th and 16th century Flemish art, the folk museum and had a horse and cart ride. Somewhere in all that we squeezed in a lovely drink watching the town in a café and really just wondering through this amazing town. The general consensus rated the horse and cart ride as the highlight, although there was some votes for the chocolate factory
(pretty generic but well done – interesting fact, chocolate must have 45% cocoa otherwise, by European law, you can’t call it chocolate – brilliant that some bureaucrat had time to write that one into the law books).


A must see city if you are anywhere in the neighbourhood. I could write forever on Bruges, but must continue to the next episode.