Kim & Phillipa’s Blog

So the last 3 weekends, we’ve been making the most of living in Europe. Perhaps a little too much! First was Berlin for Easter, then Austria with the family for a long weekend and this last weekend we were off to Belgium for a normal-size weekend

How we love to travel by train! So much more comfortable, time efficient and guess what - it was on time! You only have to get there 30 minutes before departure (not an hour and 30 minutes). Ok, so enough about how great the transit was…

We found our hotel easily enough (Last Minute to the rescue on this one), though the area we stumbled through (thanks to Google maps) was a little dodgy to say the least! We decided to spend the whole day Saturday in Bruges - and what a great decision! The town was gorgeous, with the canals throughout the city, the chocolatier’s on every corner (and then some more) and the beautiful old buildings. Oh and then the swans - they were so big and beautiful! Of course Kim had to get as close to one as possible for a photo - and promptly removed himself from it’s vicinity when it woke up (hehe).
We spent the day seeing the sights: Begijnhof, Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk (where Michaelangelo’s Madonna and Child is), Markt, Belfort, City Hall and the Heilig Bloedbasiliek (where a drop of Jesus’ blood is - don’t get Kim started on that one). We and finished up with a gondola ride then mussels and fries for dinner :). To top off a great day, there was an outdoor Eagles tribute band playing so we spent a while there singing along! They sounded astonishingly genuine and for a minute we were wondering if we had stumbled across the real thing! Until they started speaking Dutch!

The next day, we discovered some of Brussels. We were not entirely impressed at first, but then we discovered the places to see and our opinion of the place changed dramatically! The Royal Palace and gardens, Grand Place, Manneken Pin (we couldn’t believe how small the manequin pis was!) and Galeries St Hubert. All very beautiful and bustling with thousands of tourists.

We of course had to experience the Belgium waffle and found a great combination of both banana’s and strawberries with caramel sauce. Mmmmmm. Hey - when in Rome!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:46 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.