DAY 11: Bruges (Casa Romantico)

The breakfast was excellent this morning! No waffles - but delicious croissants, bread, cheese, ham, fruit, freshly-squeezed orange juice and scrambled eggs if we wanted. The breakfast room was beautifully decorated. In fact, the whole place has been decorated with a cottage-core theme and you can tell everything is high quality. We realised that it actually is a B&B, because the owner and her family live upstairs, but there is not much interaction and it has the feel of a hotel, rather than someone's home.

After breakfast, we set out to visit City Hall and its accompanying museum. The building is a beautiful example of gothic architecture and the walls and ceiling of the hall are absolutely covered with coats of arms, murals, gilding and rosettes. Very impressive. There was also an audiovisual display of the history of Bruges, which was surprisingly interesting. It involved the building of lots of canals and then having them silt up again - over and over for centuries!

When we left City Hall, it was a bit early for our Food Tour, so we headed off to a cafe for a drink and a sit down, and to warm up a little. Today seemed much colder than yesterday and Jim was even wearing his long johns. I ordered an espresso, and was delighted to be served a coffee, a small shot glass of egg nog, a marshmallow in the shape of the Virgin Mary and a pretzel to dip in the coffee - and all for €3.40. A bargain!

After that, we traipsed to Grand Market Square to meet our tour guide, Tom. It was a private tour - so just the two of us. We spent three hours with Tom and it felt like we covered the whole of Bruges. As a history and walking tour, it was a great success. As a food tour, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was called a 'tasting tour' - and it was really just that. Our first stop was a bakery where we were served a piece of Belgian bread pudding (which was like a very dense sweet slice). After that, we visited a chocolate shop (where his wife worked) and had a small dark chocolate truffle and a small praline. We then went next door for a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Belgian waffle. Both were very nice.

After that, we walked around for an hour and a half, before he reached into his backpack and brought out a little packet of (rather dull) Belgian biscuits. After another 20 minutes or so, we stopped at a bench near the canal and he reached (yet again) into his backpack for a small box of salami, cheese and some kind of sliced beef - along with a small glass of apple gin. (Apparently gin was invented by the Belgians.) So he had been carrying all these around for the whole tour.! (Lucky it wasn't hot.) We then crossed the canal and went into the Beer Museum for a glass of cherry beer. (Quite bizarre!) Our final stop was a van in the Market Square, where he bought us a box of hot chips. (Again invented by the Belgians.) Our Lille Food Tour was much more satisfactory in an culinary sense.

But we did enjoy the history lesson. We visited lots of sites, but the most interesting were the St John's Hospital (an 800-year old pilgrim hospital) and the Beginjhof - which was a precinct, built in the middle ages, which only women were allowed to enter until quite recently. It was an option for women who didn't want to marry (or who were widows) and who didn't want to enter the church. They could live in a house in the precinct and basically live their lives however they pleased without men telling them what to do. Local laws didn't apply and men were not allowed to enter under any circumstances. (No wonder it was popular!) The last resident died about 100 years ago and now the houses are used for women in financial difficulty or who are escaping domestic violence. Cool!

Some of the houses in the Begijnhof

We also walked past the site of an ancient, but still functioning, brewery on the tour - and were fascinated to learn that they recently built a 3km underground beer pipe system to send their beer from the brewery out to the newly-built bottling factory outside Bruges, as the narrow roads couldn't cope with the delivery trucks. It seems the Belgians are nothing if not resourceful.

After the tour, we visited an exhibition at the hospital that we passed on the tour - called 'Body Worlds Vital' - with real human bodies preserved via plastination and used to demonstrate all the different systems of the body - reproduction, circulation, digestion, nervous system etc. We've watched documentaries about this plastination process before but never had the chance to actually see examples of it. It is quite amazing! Surreal and quite fascinating.

After that, it was time to go back to the room for a rest, before heading out to dinner at an actual Belgian restaurant right on one of the canals.

We were given a table in a tiny window embrasure - just enough space to fit two chairs and a table, but no room to move in any other way. The window looked out onto a canal, which was pretty spectacular. The food was quite good. We started with cheese croquettes (nice), and then I had osso bucco on a bed of tagliatelle (the osso bucco was tough) and Jim had a very impressive bouillabaisse with half a lobster sitting in it. The downside was that he got very messy trying to break up the lobster. We finished off with tarte tatin and a pear cake. (Both quite good).