Au revior Paris (6th September)

We're on the road again, this time heading north to the Belgium border. It's only a four hour ride as we are stopping at Bruges. That's the French/English spelling, pronounced Bruge verses the Felmish/Dutch spelling of Brugge, pronounced of Bra-ha. The official language is Flemish, but everyone speaks at least three and most signs, menus, and museums have three languages - Flemmish (which is Dutch, but pronounced differently), French and English. Belgium is flat and we'd looked up a bike tour that we wanted to do. Busabout announced that they could get us a discount, so we immediately booked into doing it tomorrow. Slight issue being that tomorrow they are all booked out, meaning that we would have to be super speedy and rush to meet the 1pm departure time today. We arrive at the hostel at 12:25pm thinking, sweet we've got heaps of time to check in, drop our bags, get changed and head out. Not to be because the girl at the desk wouldn't check us in, so we had to take our bags up the stairs and get changed in the hallway outside the toilet (it was too small to actually get changed in). Meanwhile the cleaner is telling us off and that if we go downstairs we will get checked in. A fun start to Bruges. On top of this, we have to drop our bags in the bag storage, which just means to literally drop them in a corner of the bar. The same dumb check in girl says "it's ok there is someone in the bar at all times". Problem is that there is about 30 bags there already, so how does she know which bags are ours? Luckily we bought a stretchy lock (like a bike chain) and so we loop 3 of our 4 bags together and hope that she is smart enough to notice if someone is trying to take them out of the hostel bound together. Good news is that we do make the bike tour and it was totally amazing and worth the rush. Unlike previous tours, which had fat tyres, we are given road bikesfor our 25km ride, which makes the left front brake super sensitive. Shona found out first hand while trying to take a photo and pulled a little too hard, which meant that she hurt the cobbled street. Good news was the camera was ok (except for a couple of tiny scratches) and Shona was too. No major scratches just felt like a real blonde and managed to scare our guide a bit. Needless to say Mike had the camera after that and we only took photos when we were stopped. We saw two types of windmills. With a Belgian windmill, the cupboard is on stilts and the whole body turns towards the wind. With a Dutch windmill, it's made of bricks and only the top bit turns towards the wind. We ride along the fresh water canals to a place called Damme. Back in the old days Bruges was a massive harbour town and Damme was too. However the harbour silted up which cut both of them off from the sea. In fact Damme had a population of 25,000 and now it's less than 500. As we pass by fields we see lots of different animals - cows, horses, pigs and sheep. Belgium has a certain type of cow called a Belgium Blue. It is a cross between 3 different species and has as cute face, short legs and massive massive muscles, hence has lots of meat. These are the real 'Van Damme' cows -check out the photo for proof! Because of the size of the rump of the calves they can not have natural births, so when the baby is ready, a C section is performed to remove the calf. As such the steak is more expensive than other types (and vets do well in Belgium!). We ride through the poplar trees which were introduced by Napoleon and are planted to help break up the wind which normally would rush through the flat plains. The tour is great and 5 hours later we arrive back at the hostel to find our bags still there, as the only ones left in the baggage storage - phew! We check in, but then have to go back to get another room, because the room we are booked into appears to only have one bed free. The new room is not as good because the door doesn't shut properly so we have already decided that we will rate this hostel as a zero for security. One cool thing that we get given is a voucher to eat in the hostel restaurant which entitles us to a trio of beer samplers. So Mike has the traditional Flemish beef stew and Shona the salmon with lobster sauce with our beer. Mike was keen to have all the beer, but Shona does like the cherry beer - the first ever beer she can drink! Of course -because we are in Belgium, we HAVE to have sides of frites (fries) served with mayonnaise. Afterwards we decide to wander around Bruge by night. It really is a magical medieval fairytale. The canals run between the town's bridges, cobbled streets and medieval houses. Throw in a belfry (bell tower) a few squares, parks and the swans and you can imagine it's very beautiful. After following some swans along the canal to try and get the best photo of them by night, we head to bed. The history behind the swans is that the townsfolk chopped off the head of 'Pieter Lanchals' (a name which means 'long neck') the tax announcer. As punishment, the ruler at the time obligated the city to always have long necked swans (our tour guide would have preferred that it had been giraffes!) No surprise that the mattresses at the hostel feel like sleeping on springs and we have found ourselves a clear winner... Bauhaus is the worst we have stayed at so far (and we've slept in 16 of them now). Oh well, we definitely won't let it spoil our time in Bruges.