Bruges by Sasha

I was a little sad to find out that we had completely skipped an entire country of blog posts, so I am going to do my best to remember lots of what we did in the short four days we had in Belgium.

Four days. It doesn’t really seem like that much time to do everything in one entirely different country. Four days seems kind of like the amount of time you would spend in Edmonton, if you drove from Calgary, but on the 27^th of April, we drove from Paris, France all the way to a big seaside town just outside of Bruges, Belgium.

This destination was slightly different than the rest because we had another person to add to the fun… Haley Koehn. Our cousin who was visiting from Amsterdam.

The first official day in Bruges, we went to a Historium. You get guided through different room settings and a scene associated with the room plays on a screen.

After that, we walked around for a bit, and bought waffles from one of the many stands around the city. We also went on a boat tour along the river than runs through the buildings. Many of the houses and apartments had dates on them, one of which dated back to 1617. We went under all of the old bridges and one of my favorite parts was when we got up close to a whole bunch of swans. One started shaking and got some people wet, but it was really cool to go up close to so many of them

Second day in Bruges, was our food-touring day. Bruges has lots of food stands for waffles, fries, hotdogs, and there are chocolate and liquor shops everywhere. We started with the famous chocolate shop, Chocolate Line. There were crazy chocolate flavors, and some are in the picture that Riley posted in her last blog. I don’t have a favorite, but I liked the bacon one and the skull filled with red liquid that I’m pretty sure, was supposed to be blood.

Next we went to the candy shop where you could see two employees making handmade candy for their shop. It was a pretty physical process and behind the glass everyone watching was trying to figure out what exactly they were doing.

We also went on a tour around a beer factory, a family business that’s been going on for years. At the end of the tour, the adults got to taste the unfiltered beer but the kids stuck with Coke instead. To finish off the day, we got some hot fries with too much ketchup and I’m pretty sure I burned my tongue at least five times.

On the day we went on our bike ride, it was rainy and overcast. I didn’t really care because I hate riding in hot weather. We rode around Bruges for a while and then rode all the way to Damme. We stopped for lunch, which consisted of more waffles and whipped cream or ice cream, and we leaned the legend of the black dog that saved the town from drowning.

I really enjoyed the time we spent in Belgium and I was glad to have another family member traveling with us.

That’s it for today. Thanks for visiting our blog.

-S