Day 22 - Bruges & Brussels

I kept changing my mind during breakfast and ended up catching a train to Bruges in the morning.  I arrived in a charming tourist town of picturesque houses and streets lined with flowers and Belgian waffle shops.  We walked into beautiful churches and past ever-so-tempting chocolate stores.  There were a few canals that ornamented the town, though not nearly as many as Amsterdam.  We climbed the 338 steps to the top of the famous steeple from which we could see the entire city.  As a reward, we finally gave in to waffles.  As if they didn’t taste good enough, the aroma followed us everywhere.  We also visited St. John’s hospital museum, which demonstrated how the sick were treated before the age of modern medicine.  A little eerie, but pretty cool.

 

I did not want to leave Bruges, but my friends convinced me that I should see Brussels.  I caught a train and arrived in Brussels completely unprepared.  I took a picture of a city map I found on the street as a reference and looked for big streets.  I went down a large street and found what I thought was immigrant central.  There were Russians and Muslims all around me; the first street I found was Stalingrad.  There was not a woman in sight.  I didn’t like where I was headed, so I turned around and asked for directions at a convenience store.  The man pointed me back down the same street.  I reluctantly carried on, but it took me half an hour to find a woman, and the few that I did see had their heads covered.  The streets were lined with trash instead of flowers; this could not be further from Bruges.

True, this was not the city center, but it was not far from it.  The center of the city had the typical grandiose buildings with large columns as wells as modern buildings in the business districts, but it was very small, and two blocks in any direction would lead you back to the same trash-lined, woman-less neighborhoods.  I did not find any of the main tourist attractions, but I had had enough secondhand smoke and multilingual catcalls for one day.  I took the train home as soon as it got dark, and for once I was happy to leave.