World Wide Wabs

A quick one, not focused on food. Hopefully this provides a few helpful nuggets if you’re planning a visit to Bruges. If you’ve already been, and have advice to add (especially Bruge restaurant recommendations) I’d love to hear from you.

A little Bruges sky thinking

Getting to Bruges

The closest international airport is Brussels, and from there it’s another 1 hour train journey to Bruge. If visiting from Europe, train lines are well connected. We took a 6 hr bus ride from London for £25 per person. The bus sat in a train carriage while going through the EuroTunnel. Kinda like a heavy transport version of turducken.

Staying in Bruges

Bruge is a tiny walkable city, and the footpaths radiating around the old city are lush with flora and canals. So if on a budget, staying outside of the city gates might be a more value-for-money option. We paid €55 a night for a double-bed with ensuite bathroom.

Het Wit Beertje (their website shows photos that are pretty accurate)
Witte Beerstraat 4
Bruges

Our host Jean-Pierre Defour was friendly, attentive and served a generous breakfast of bread, vanilla custard pastry, meat, cheese and cucumber yoghurt (and fruit and yoghurt off screen).

Getting around in Bruge

You can walk the entire old city in a day, and going on foot makes it easy to nip into quiet pretty little residential lanes.

Or for the full tourist experience, you can canter around town in a horse carriage or do a boat tour of the canals.

Things to do in Bruge

Besides the usual art and city history museums, 4 slightly kookier options are the Haalve Maan Brewery Museum, the Diamond Museum, the Friet Museum and the Chocolate Museum. The latter 2 have many “exhibits” for tasting and the Chocolate Museum sells all kinds of moulds for home-based chocolatiers.

Five Fun Friet Facts, and then Farewell

• Potatoes were largely shunned as poor man’s food when they were first introduced in England. Their market value rose only after a savvy farmer put fences and guards around his potato fields, making them seem valueable. Gotta love old school marketing
• China is currently the largest global producer of potatotes, even though potatoes play no significant role in Chinese cuisine
• Friets are allegedly a Belgian invention. Fishermen who caught and fried little minnows tossed potato bits into hot oil one harsh winter when the fish weren’t biting.
• Friets ended up being called French Fries in America because some French-speaking Belgian soldiers offered them to some American soldiers during WWII. The Belgian soldiers never got around to correcting them, possibly because they didn’t think Walloon Fries sounded much better
• Friets were traditionally fried in a mixture of beef fat and horse fat

For more research and ideas on Bruges, Wikitravel provides a well-researched write-up.

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We made it through our first stop, Bruges, a pretty town with great weather (while we were here), which was lucky as we’re only starting to get to grips with living on a tight budget, and walking around pretty towns in good weather is, well, free.

The only tourist attraction we splashed out on was a combined ticket to the frites museum and the chocolate museum. Two of my favourite, if not healthiest, foods – how could we resist? The museums were educational too, weaving in the native American histories of each with stories of the European explorers who brought them eventually to Belgium’s shores.

More pics of Bruges

Amir

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