Some pics from Bruges, Belgium.

Note,  the heron.

Just some pix from a beautiful day in Bruges, Belgium.

Lunch in Bruges

We are sitting in the courtyard outside our hotel room with the sun blazing down drinking NZ Savignon blanc, courtesy of Sarah, and eating roast quail bought from the market in the old Markt square, that has been a market place since the 10th century.

Market square, Bruge. (since 10th century)

You do have to regularly pinch yourself in this amazing city where horse and carriages trot around the cobble streets taking tourists around the ancient centre and the carrillion in the bell tower of the 13th century church beside the hotel plays a mix of ancient and modern songs every 15 minutes. Thine be the glory one minute, followed by a Beatles song the next time.

The fish market has been in the same location since the year 1700, 

on stone benches under a pitched wooden roof beside the canal in the centre of Bruges and just through a golden archway is the fruit and vegetable market, the one that has been there every wednesday since the year 900.

Just through the golden archway to the fish market.
A little variation on the golden arches of
MacDonalds the we are used to!

We are completely surrounded by history.

Tomorrow, there is the annual ceremony in the big square outside the church for bringing in the blood, which is a small phial of Christ’s blood that was brought here from Jerusalem in 1150.

They are setting up the stage and the grandstands out in the square at this very moment.

The state house or town hall built in 1376, outside our hotel in Bruges.

Anna and I have walked the streets of the inner city this morning, had our lunch bought from the market, and are about to venture out to explore the larger town area.

We fled from Holland yesterday afternoon after waking to yet another day of rain and freezing cold wind, partly to make the most of our rental car, but also to enjoy being in Europe where an hours driving can put you into a totally different country.

Cute little restaurants around every corner.

The one we are in at the moment is Belgium, the western Flanders part of the country, an area that has been the battleground for many armies over the centuries.

We don’t want to visit the actual battlefields in the fields of Flanders where over 500,000 men lost their lives in WW1, it is too sad and represents such a tragic waste of life, but we have made a two day stop in the medieval town of Bruges.

We are planning to drive south into France, maybe to stay at Lille for a night or two before heading back into Belgium and making for Maastricht in Holland.

This will also give us a good look at the likely route for taking our boat into France.

It is cold here in Bruges, but at least the sun comes out every so often and it’s not raining.

This is the Venice of the north.

A Weekend with Sarah

Last weekend our youngest daughter Sarah popped over from London to stay with us on our boat.

Luckily, she arrived just as we were launching, that is covered in an earlier blog so I won’t bore you with the details, but we all spent a few nights together on the water at last.

We also did a couple of sight seeing trips, the first, down south to the islands of Zeeland, across the amazing dams that were built to keep the sea out after the dreadful floods of 1953 that killed 1500 people.

One of our lovely dutch friends here in the boatyard, Artie, was a child of 11 years old during those floods and he told us how his family managed to escape from the rising water into their attic where he played his trumpet to attract the attention of rescuers.

The town hall in Middelburg

The islands of Zeeland are flat and often below sea level. 

They shouldn’t really exist if it wasn’t for the dogged dutch engineering which has managed to totally control the sea levels around the islands. 

Good thing they don’t get tsunamis here!

We had fresh fish and chips straight from the north sea and tried our best to shop in Middelburg, but really we just enjoyed being together as three adult friends exploring new places.

The next day we drove to Den Haag, or The Hague as us honkies call it. 

The capital city and seat of the Dutch Government.

Also the place where they try all the war criminals.

Yes, I was that tourist driving down the tram lines
in a Ferrari red Fiat Panda!

I took a wrong turn in the middle of the city and ended up driving along the railway lines, which was something of a butt clenching moment, but fortunately there wasn’t a train at that particular time.

The palace courtyard in Den Haag

We had a look around the royal palace and had lunch in a outdoor cafe set in the middle of beautiful old buildings.

The whole experience here can be quite surreal and we have to keep reminding ourselves that we are actually doing it, not just in a theme park having a virtual experience.

We have been in Holland for six weeks now and it has almost become normal.

We feel like the rest of the population over here, going about our everyday business often quite unremarkable, shopping at the supermarket or the hardware store, but around many corners is a complete surprise, like an old fishing village or a collection of immaculate farm buildings with a huge working windmill in the middle.

We are definitely not bored with Holland, but we have made that shift from starry eyed visitors to almost residents.

Maybe it’s time to move on?

We are still noticing the small things like this
garden of tulips in Zierikzee.

Amsterdam

Sarah about to head back to London,
at the station with Anita (right).

We have just dropped Sarah off at the central railway station to return to London after spending a wonderful weekend with her in Holland and it’s now 1130 and we are walking through the red light district of Amsterdam and wondering if what we are seeing is real.

There are streets full of houses with lots of little windows and in nearly every window is a girl in her underwear looking shamelessly erotic.

They are every shape and size you could wish for, (or not!)

This is quite a weird feeling, walking past this bizarre sideshow of prostitutes with Anna, Anita, and thousands of other tourists, just minutes from the railway station in downtown Amsterdam.

The air is thick with marijuana smoke, sweet and sickly, wafting out from nearly every coffee shop and people openly smoking large joints on the streets.

What a strange place this is where sex and drugs are one of the first things to leap out and grab you when you first get off the train.

The Oude Kerk, a haven amongst the brothels

It is initially hard to see the beauty in this city and it’s only when we finally stumble upon a gracious old church, almost totally surrounded by prostitutes in their little kiosks, that I realise this city is a pageant of contrasts.

In the same way that Paris has enchanting romantic architecture alongside homeless beggars on the cobbled streets, Amsterdam has sex, sleeze and drugs cheek by jowl with 16th century houses alongside the never-ending tree lined canals.

It takes some getting used to and I didn’t find one day was enough to get past the juxtaposition of sex tourism and historic Holland.

Yes we bought our piece of “Space Cake” and walked through the alley ways gawking at the sex workers along with all the other tourists, but overall, the experience was rather bewildering.

We found a lively restaurant with tables upstairs on a balcony overlooking one of the busy canals and sat in the sun to watch the activity on the surrounding tables and on the waterway below.

I ordered a ciabatta roll with beef, which came with thin slices of raw beef, which I couldn’t bring myself to eat. 

Anna generously swapped her lovely looking chicken roll for my beef one and said that it was, “almost like eating smoked salmon, quite nice really.”

On a nearby table a very urbane family was celebrating the engagement of a handsome young couple, on another, half a dozen young supermodel girls were out for lunch dressed for a Paris fashion show and outside on a bridge a couple kissed romantically.

Anita showed us around some adorable places including a secluded, tranquil area that used to house wealthy single women and the charming old university grounds where she studied music.

We sat on the steps of a cast iron footbridge over a canal, eating hand made chocolates from Puccini, while yet another young couple kissed passionately in a doorway nearby and later found a table in a sun drenched courtyard overlooking a canal while a jazz combo played softly in the background and we drank Grolsch lager and French wine.

Yes, we had a relatively fleeting experience of Amsterdam and we left on the metro to find our car in one of the free parking areas on the fringe of the city, with many images swirling in our minds like random snapshots in a travel photo album.

Two of the most memorable impressions were the pair of coots that had made their nest out of a collection of floating litter on a small platform near the side of a canal, with the male bird busily bringing twigs and any other suitable debris to the female who was sitting proudly on top of her rubbish pile keeping her eggs warm.

The other was the  swan that had also made it’s nest from floating rubbish on a wooden platform right next to all the tourist boat wharfs. 

In the middle of all this hustle and bustle, these lovely birds were just getting on with their normal life oblivious to the constant human circus of sex, drugs and romance. 

There might be a message in that for me.

And the space cake?

We had it with a cup of tea later in the day when we got back to our boat and after a couple of hours, I asked Anna if she felt anything different and she said no, and neither did I. 

So that was our experience of Amsterdam. 

Probably didn’t give it long enough to get over the initial culture shock, but enjoyed the architecture, the endless canals and their indigenous inhabitants. 

Here are some images of Amsterdam.