Brugge, Belgium: The land of chocolate, waffles, and lace

Posted on October 29, 2009. Filed under: Uncategorized |

I know this is later than usual, but I will try to remember everything that I can.

Well we left on Wednesday last week and, for the first time, travelled by ferry. I will certainly surprised at how nice the ferry was. There was a Four Seasons, cinema, casino, liqour store, and multiple other things. We had gotten on the boat two hours before we were supposed to leave so we decided to look around and find our room. We got to our room and I was surprised by it also. We had four beds and our own bathroom. After that we decided to go and look around and get some supper. The boat took both pounds and euros so I just decided to exchange my money at the time. I was happy that my amount of money increased when it was exchanged to euros. After looking around we went and decided to eat at the buffet in the Four Seasons. Here is a list of everything that I ate (that I can remember): spaghetti, mashed potatos, dinner roll, roast beef, fish, green beans, baked potatos, zucchini & mushrooms, yorkshire pudding (tasted like chlorine, I did not like it), salad, grapes, cheese, a fruit tart, blueberry cheesecake, a water, and a hot chocolate. We all ate for about an hour and a half straight. I would have to say that was the most food I have ever eaten at one time. Now almost all of the food was amamzing…the cheese was not. Cody thought that we all needed to try this cheese that was moldy (it was supposed to be). Emily smelled it and said, “this smells like cow poop!” And..it did. So we all tried it and guess what….it tasted like cow poop. I about threw up, along with the other three. It was one of the worst things ever! And of course the taste would not leave my mouth for a while. After our meal we just hung out and eventually fell asleep. I found out that I dont sleep well on boats.

We arrived in Zeebrugge,Belgium Thursday morning, caught a coach (a Mercedes-Benz coach at that) to Brugge, and went to the bus station. Our encounter with the bus driver was not pleasent. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we told him the hostel we were trying to find…and to be nice about it, he was a jerk! Luckily there was a nice guy on the bus who told us which stop we had to get off at and where the hostel was. We got to our hostel, the Art Hostel, put our stuff in our room and figured out what sites we wanted to see for the next 3 days, and then we went to find some place to eat. We walked and found a bistro to eat at. Everything was pretty expensive and the food wasn’t all that great (i got spaghetti). From there we walked to the city center, which was about a 20 min walk from our hostel. We walked around and went to the Friet (fry) Museum (fries were invented in Belgium) and went in about every chocolate store we saw. There were prolly like a million. I bought a box of chocolate for myself at the chocolate store across from our hostel. I got 350 grams and I think so far I have eaten 2 pieces. I must say I am pretty chocolated out. I still haven’t eaten another piece and it’s been about a week.

Friday we walked back to the city center and we finally got to eat some waffles!! I was so excited because I love waffles. I ordered the fresh fruit and whipped cream waffles, they were DELICIOUS. The waffle was crispy and perfect. Emily had also found that you can order waffles with choclate and ice cream on them (she got that kind the two times we had waffles). That was probably the highlight of my trip. We went to the choco-story museum, went and saw “The Madonna, ate supper at pizza hut,went to a candy shop where they made hard candies (which are delicious), and walked around some more.

Saturday we got up and went to eat waffles again. I was more disappointed this time because I was looking forward to having strawberry and whipped cream waffles, but I couldn’t because they were out of season. So I instead got a waffle with butter and powdered sugar. Still good…but I was looking forward to strawberries . We didn’t really have anything else to do this day except go to the bus station to get back to Zeebrugge to get on the ferry. So we walked to the bus station and sat there for several hours until our bus came, got back to the ferry, and went back to Hull. We also finally got our first stamp (besides England) in our passport.