Belgium - Day 6 - In Bruges

Side bar: We are back on terra firma as of this post, having made the loooong trip back home. Woke up around 4:30 AM Brussels time (+7 hours from Nashville) for the flight to London. Got to hang out at Heathrow for 4 hours, then the big plane to Chicago. We got lucky in Chicago and came home a few hours early, by getting standby on an earlier flight to Nashville.

We were literally handing our tickets to the gate agent when a couple came running up, having just got off the plane from Dublin. They hold us and give our seats to those two (who had booked them), leaving us fuming. Fortunately, there were exactly two more seats available on the flight, so we got to come home.

Well, well...day 6 in the lovely city of Bruges. Don't hold the movie (which I've never seen) against it.

Bruges is an absolutely spectacular medieval city which left us lost culturally, spatially, and habitat-ually. Read on for details.

We caught an 8 AM train from Brussels to Bruges with the intention of going on a bike tour. This is the same tour that Chatty and Heath (shout out!) tried to go on when they were here last year. We had signed up for the tour online the night before and glanced at the meeting spot. We knew it was "in the square" but I had intended to log on in the morning to get the exact location. Obviously, since I'm telling the story, I did not. Guilty as charged.

So, we wandered around the main square in town, looking for a bunch of people with bikes, besides the bunch of people that reside in the city with bikes. Nowhere to be found. We ended up asking in a bike shop where the meeting spot was, as the tour was supposed to begin, and it was exactly where we had been standing, in front of the belfry. As I found out the next day, the tour company had send me an email at 2 AM indicating that the tour would not be held. Too bad, so sad. However, at the time we assumed that they just didn't show (which they didn't), so we climbed the belfry tower (belfort in Dutch).

Apparently, playing bells, in a bell tower, is a big part of Belgian culture. There are a number of towns which have belfries dating from the middle ages, which have several dozen bells attached to a keyboard and to what is essentially a big player piano. A person can play the bells, which each town does a few times per week, but otherwise they have a machine play a different tune every 15 minutes. The big cylinder shown here has pins on the outside, which strike keys above the cylinder, which are wired to hammers that strike the bells. In Bruges, you can hear a particularly awful rendition of "Danny Boy" at 15 minutes past the hour. (It is actually 11 minutes past the hour...the old mechanical clock is not the most accurate.)

After all of that excitement, we wandered around until lunch time, when we finally got to eat some mussels! We went to a restaurant which was recommended by our new Belgian friends (see Amsterdam) for seafood and local fare. Dru ordered moules au bier (mussels in a beer sauce) and I got moules aphrodisiac, which was a spicy sauce with onions and chili peppers, among other things. Fantastic, though it is early in the season and some of the mussels were a bit small. And of course it all came with a big bowl of fries. Before (each pot is one serving)...


...and after...


Boo-yah!

After that we tried some postprandial chocolates, since we were on a mission to determine the best chocolatier in Belgium, and toured the De Halve Maan brewery, as part of our mission to determine the best brewery in Belgium. We went to a shop called Chocolate Line, which had some interesting flavors. We tried (among other things), Tea, Chili Pepper, and Lemongrass. Quite good, but the Saffron chocolate from Marcolini is the best so far.

Dru is chiming in: Yes, Marcolini, indeed the best so far! As for Bruges, it is beautiful and we should know - we traversed it several times throughout the day, between searching for the bike tour, the brewery, the chocolate shop, and art museum, back down to the train station to check what time the last train out was, and then a stroll through the park by one of the many canals. By then, it was time for dinner and we were excited to try another restaurant recomendation. Once we found the one we were looking for, we were dissapointed to find that it was closed on zonterdag (or whichever the word for Thursday is in Dutch) and we consulted the guidebook.

This is all leading up to a social gaffe OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. The stage is set - we are dressed for a 3 hour bike tour, sweaty and smelly from walking, sunburned, carrying a backpack. We arrive at De Karmelieat, knowing that it was a "gastronomic" (aka a rating of three euro signs in the guidebook) so we were expecting it to be a little fancy. However, the dinner that followed exceeded all standards for froo-froo, posh, fancy-pants, hoity toity, classy restaurants that we have ever known.

Where to even begin. The door man in a three piece suit ushered us in (and offered to take our back pack) to be greeted by the extremely suave maitre d' who offered us a cocktail and repose in the lounge. Of course, we declined, being quite hungry, which earned us a small frown for not following the formula. Beyond that though, the staff and service were impecable, despite our extreme hoi poloi-ness...i.e., it was such a nice joint that they wouldn't even raise an eyebrow at the sweaty couple in jeans.

We were shown to a table and proceded to be waited on by a staff of no less than 9, including the sommelier and his assistant, our official waiter, another assistant, a young server, a man whose sole purpose was to describe the food after it was delivered, and a fromagier (but we will get to her in a second). We were given menus - the "ladies" menu did not have prices on it, which we did not even realize until conferring much later. For those of you unfamiliar, this is a largely antiquated practice of obscuring the cost of the meal, the premise being that the lady should order whatever she wants, regardless of the cost.

Now, as this whole process is going on, we are making mistakes left and right. Amuse bouche were given to us and I put down the menu to eat them - which signaled to the waiter that I as ready to order, even though I was not. This seems minor, but trust me, in the setting, it was mortifying. I pretty much had a perma-blush the entire time. But our embarrassment aside ... the food was fantastic. We elected the 3 course menu, which ended up somewhere around 7...a plated three part amuse bouche, as well as a shared plate of amuse, the appetizer, the entree, a cheese course, the desert, and mignardises and coffee. They also had a 5 and an 8 course menu, which presumably also grow proportionately. The food just kept on coming, always with long descriptions of many ingredients and components (there was foam invovled), and impecable service - new silveware, crumb wiping, saucing and re-saucing (half-way through the plate, the head waiter returned with more sauce), wine refilling (even if it was down a sip), and even a new napkin rolled out at Ben's place to cover the errant splatters. (Ben: I was enthusiasic about the meal.)

Now, given our predicament, obviously I did not want to pull out the camera to take pictures of this meal. However, when the cheese lady came out with her cart, another table asked if they could take a photo and I seized the opportunity. Unbelievable ... and delicious.

So, we wrapped up this experience around 10:30, walking out about 10:40. The trains back to Brussels left every half hour and we were a good walk from the station. Rather than run (as we were rather stuffed) we strolled and enjoyed Bruges at night - the lit up square, an accordian player, very content.

Until we got to the train station and saw that the last train had left at 10:58. There was no 11:30 train. Now for those astute readers, you noted that we did check this earlier in the day. Though no one admits to any fault in the situation ... we were trapped in Bruges for the night.

We walked back into town, hoping to find a hotel with a desk clerk still there at midnight. I offered to pretend to be pregnant, if that would help us find "a room at the inn". We did find a very nice hotel (very nice) and we are pretty sure the man gave us a discounted rate (and offered us toothbrushes). The room was beautiful and the bed was extremely comfortable. All in all, an evening of unanticipated luxury. And we are not complaining.

Tune in tomorrow for: A direct train Bruges to Ghent! More walking! Hanging cured pork legs! And dinner across the street from our apartment!