In Brugge

Our Eurostar tickets entitled us to travel on to any other Belgium city within 24 hours of arriving in Brussels, so we headed to the infamous Brugge.  The quick one hour train ride was wonderful.  In fact it was so great that we thought we would accidentally sit on the first class car.  Honestly, we didn't know that we had until the conductor came through to punch our tickets.  We thought the seats seemed pretty nice and the car was awfully quite...sorry Mr. Conductor.

Brugge is a beautiful city of old filled with lovely buildings with amazing canals running through it.  It is sometimes known as the "Venice of the North."   This area seemed to be our favorite because it was quite and not as congested as the rest of the city that day.  The bridge behind Kevin leads into the Begijnhof which is a sanctuary for women to serve as nuns, but they really aren't fully nuns because they can leave at any time.

Here I am inside the middle of the Begijnhof with all the beautiful daffodils.  It's really a quaint little community of these white painted attached homes.  There are signs posted all over the place asking you to be quiet.  Well we broke the beautiful silence when I asked Addison not to play so closely to this other little girl walking around because I didn't want here to pass on the "pox"...well I should have thought of that before I drug her all the way there in the first place.  She got pretty upset with me and Kevin had to carry her out kicking and screaming.  The poor little thing...she just wanted a playmate and I told her no after Kevin had said she could get down out of the stroller to play for a while.  I could tell the stress of the week was carrying into our holiday fun.

The most relaxing and enjoyable meal we had on the whole trip happened to be lunch while in Brugge.  We sat outside at this amazing little place and people watched between eating and feeding the kids.  I had this amazing chicken while Kevin ordered a pot of steamed mussels which is a very popular dish in Belgium, especially when they are in season.  Addison again enjoyed a bowl full of French fries...do you see a trend here.

She looks sweet and angelic, but this little girl is very independent and with this pose she looks like she was ready to take over the town.  Addison did love seeing all the ducks and swans that floated in the canal.  Also there were horse drawn buggies moving throughout the town and she loved the "Neigh-neighs" as she calls them.  We tried hopping on one of the horse rides but found out that the starting point was actually in the town square so we headed up that way.

When we got to the Market Square it was a ZOO!!!  It was very, very busy and on top of things there was a huge carnival going on in the middle of things.  The most commanding landmark though is the Belford tower.  This is the infamous tower that Colin Farrel's associate tries tell the "American tourists" that they were crazy to try and climb in the movie "In Bruges" if you've seen it.  We would have loved to climb it ourselves but both kiddos zonked out just as we got to it and the cue was really long so we admired the view from the ground.

The Market Square in Brugge was very colorful with the brightly painted buildings all around.  We had a tough time finding where the horse rides started so we decided that we would opt for a canal ride instead.  

We headed off towards an area called the Burg which is just off the main market square.  Here we visited the Basilica of the Holy Blood which is the holiest of churches in Brugge.  Here there were very moving statues of Christ during his crucifixion and it really moved me.  Kevin and I took some time to reflect on the Easter holiday and lit candles at the church.

We made our way down "Blind Donkey Alley" which is just a very pretty alleyway that leads to the canal and old fish markets.  It was here where we hopped on our canal ride.  It is also where I lost the plastic eye piece on our camera...Kevin warned me several times that it was coming off and being the defiant little me I didn't pay any attention.   Not a horrible loss but my forehead really hurt by the end of the day by banging that thing on my face.

They packed us on the boat like sardines.  Which if it would have just been the two of us, it wouldn't have been that bad, but we were the only ones with two little kids who needed constant attention or they were likely to fly out the boat.  The canal cruise was pretty cool though.  One of the funniest things I remember was this big golden retriever sitting at an open window half asleep just staring out at people as we passed by without a care in the world.

Our little ones always looked so cute when they would both fall asleep in the stroller.  Actually so cute that Kevin and I should have charged people for staring at them and point.  Kevin said that if he could get 5 pence for everytime someone looked or pointed at them and the stroller he'd be a millionaire by the end of our trip.  We do have a pretty unique stroller that not a lot of people have seen and when they see Harry down below they often have to do a double take to see that there is another little one riding underneath.

We ended our day in Brugge with dinner at the place next door to where we had lunch.  Kevin got to taste some of the locally brewed beer called Brugge Zot and he liked it so much that we had to rush to find a few bottles before the shops closed.  We had some amazing pasta dishes as well.  As you can tell, food is a big part about my enjoying a trip or not.  White asparagus was in season and so I got the asparagus and salmon over penne pasta and it was delicious-o!!!  We finally got Addison to eat some spaghetti.  

We headed back to the train station and had to buy tickets back because our 24 hours had run out.  The gentleman at the Brussels train station said it would only cost 8 Euro each to come back, but he was wrong!  It wasn't a big deal in the grand sceme of things that they were 13 Euro each, but I want to know this other guy's source.