The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Brugge/Bruges

After spending two nights relaxing in a nice hotel in Brussels we headed north west to the city of Brugge, famous for the movie ‘In Brugge’ and for Belgium Chocolate! We arrived by train at about midday and headed by bus to our hostel about 2km from the centre of the old city (but within the moat – Brugge old city is surrounded by a giant moat/canal). Our hostel was the St Christopher’s Bauhaus Hostel and consisted of basically three buildings with dorms, private rooms, a big bar and a restaurant and free breakfast.

The rooms were well equipped and the dorm we stayed in had ‘cubicle’ type bunk beds with curtains, power points and reading lights…. Quite a lot better than bunk beds we had stayed in previously as they were very new. The first night we stayed in a private room and the bunks the subsequent two nights were actually better! We ended up in a room with 10 other people (and the first night we were in with a whole band from Ireland). All up a very good place to stay.

From the moment we got to Brugge we loved it. It was full of canals and cobbled streets and beautiful old buildings. Our first afternoon we spent the afternoon hanging out in the hotel before heading to the bar for happy hour which consisted of 1 Euro Belgium beers called Jupiler which were excellent and very popular. They actually ran out of beer at the bar on our first night.

After a much needed sleep we hired bikes the next morning from the hostel and spent the morning cycling around the canals and into the city centre where we had Belgium waffles and watched all the birds and horse drawn carts (which were very expensive!) and visited a Belgium Chocolate shop called ‘Steff’s’ which we had read about online, and bought a small bag of mixed chocolates and truffles which were incredible. The truffles were better than anything we can get back home. That afternoon we moved into the dorm room and once again spent some time at the bar for happy hour (which actually runs for two hours).

Day three in Brugge and we headed back into the city to post some stuff back to Australia (Stupidly enough postage was half the price to Australia than it was from London and was air mail taking 10 days rather than shipping that takes 60 days! The UK postal service is a rip). After sending several kilograms of gear back and lightening our loads we had a nice lunch we headed to one of the canal ports and went on an hour long cruise around the canals of the city. It was excellent to see some of the quiet areas of the city and hear about the history. A much better canal trip than the one we did in Amsterdam a few days back.

The following morning we got up early and climbed to the top of the bell tower which gave an excellent view over the city and we were up there when the bells went off which was incredible. They have 47 bells up the top, all of different sizes that play a tune using a mechanism that looks like the workings of a 3 metre high music box. Definitely worth seeing and staying up the top until the bells chime. After the climb we headed to the train station to start our day long journey to Venice in Italy which involved a 2 hour train ride back to Brussels followed by a 1 hour mini-bus ride to the airport, followed by a 2 hour flight to the airport inland from Venice and then an hour bus to Venice followed by a Taxi ride to our next destination! Quite a full on day but everything went very smoothly!