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.