Bruge

After a good nights sleep we were back on a train this time to Bruges.
Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. Along with a few other canal-based northern cities, it is sometimes referred to as "The Venice of the North". Bruges also has a significant economic importance thanks to its port. At one time it was the "chief commercial city" of the world.

We ate the chocolate that we bought the night before for breakfast on the train and it was the original mallow puff! All the ones you get in NZ are poor imitations.
 

We were so impressed with this little city, it is cris-crossed with canals (that were frozen over at this time) and is covered with churches and cute little parks.

We found a nice café where we stopped for breakfast called T’oost. We ordered what we thought was the express breakfast of toast and a hot drink. What came out was a huge bowl of carbs…..each. Each bowl has a croissant, a pain au chocolate, a huge bread roll, and about 3 slices of other types of bread. Along with the carb explosion was 4 shot glasses full of different flavours of jams. Hamish really got into this breakfast, and ended up passing Lou the extra bread under the table for me to put in my handbag and then getting the left over jam out of the shot glasses with a spoon. Classy.

Thoroughly full, we strolled down the snow packed streets. We found some really beautiful churches. The shops were quite similar to Brussels lots of chocolates and lace. We also found the most awesome Christmas decoration shop, that sold every single different type of Christmas decoration you could think of, we spent quite a bit of time in there!

We saw the sights of Bruges including The Provincial Hof (the City hall), the town square where they had yet more Christmas markets and the infamous Belgian Beer wall.

Mmmm beer wall

We were keen to try mussels from Belgium as they promoted them everywhere we went. We found a nice restaurant and ordered a pot of mussels and a Flemish style stew. The mussels were about half the size of NZ ones and not that tasty, a bit disappointing but also quite a nice feeling that we have the best seafood in the world!

We noticed while we were nice and cosy inside that it had started to snow, really snow. We were like little kids and went out side to play, until we realised that when snow melts on you its really cold. But we still chucked around a few snowballs.

Thats snow all over Lou. Not bad dandruff...

We had a thought that our scheduled train might be a bit late because of the snow so we made the call to head back to Brussels earlier. We thawed out on the train dried out our gloves and stuff and then once we got back to Brussels we wandered around for a bit before getting to the station. This was also the time we got to try our first Belgium waffle, amazing. Freshly made hot waffle topped with strawberries and chocolate… bliss.

We turned up to the station and the Eurostar line was pretty substantial at that stage, but we had 90 minutes to go so we weren’t too worried (for trains you only need to be there 30m before). Then the rumours around the crowd that all the trains were cancelled started and there was massive snowfall in London. Since we had got no information from the Eurostar we didn’t know what to believe.

It became obvious that something was up when our train didn’t show. We ended up standing in a line in a packed room for about 9 hours until at midnight, the Eurostar staff finally told us that they would put us up in a hotel for the night but “come back as soon as the station opens because the next train is first come first serve”. It got quite ugly and the police and the dogs had to come because some of the passengers got really upset. It was really badly handled by Eurostar with no actual line and people almost (and in some cases actually) fighting past each other to get through - it was madness.

So we had no sleep, but just lay down on this hotel bed for a couple of hours. Then we were back at 4.30am and the first train was cancelled again so we finally got on the train about 9.30am and got back at lunch time...I a little late for work. What a mission.

We were so happy to get back to London; there was so much snow around but not half as pretty as Belgium. We got home early afternoon, tired and dirty but full of nice Christmas memories.

Snow on our street when we got back to London.

Highlight: The Bruges city, so beautiful in every way
Lowlight: The waiting…..and the waiting and more waiting.
Interesting fact #1: The first book in English ever printed was published in Bruges by William Caxton.
Interesting fact #2: Eurostar have rubbish customer service and dont know what to do when it snows even though it happens every year.