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Published: June 23rd 2009
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Hi Everyone,
Today was another fun filled day in fantasy land...I mean Bruges! This city is almost like being in Disneyland. It seems like it was created and maintained solely for the sake of the visitors. And everyone here seems to be a visitor. The streets are filled with people snapping pictures and buying postcards. Strangely enough I don't hear much English. I guess Bruges is one of those tourist places that attract, not just foreigners but people from within its own borders.
This morning I walked up 366 steps to the top of the Belfry tower on the Markt square. This belfry has 47 bells and still employs a full time carillon, who does bell concerts every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. I have heard that 'Don't Worry Be Happy' is a favorite. The view from the top is incredible. After visiting the Belfry I walked to Church of Our Lady, which is home to one of the few Michelangelo sculptures ourside of Italy, and the only one that left Italy during his lifetime.
Madonna and Child is lovely and delicate. It features a naked toddler about 2 years old. Not your normal swaddled in a manger images. I wonder how
closely it mirrors Michelangelo's
Pieta? I won't get to see that until I get to Italy, but I will let you know.
After lunch I went to the Jerusalem church and watched a lace making demonstration. This type of lace making is called bobbin lace. It is very complicated. First you have a pattern from which you draw a sketch on a piece of paper. You then put pins in the appropriate places, the pins act as placeholders around which the threads are wound and twisted. You stick your pins into the paper on top of a giant flat pin cushion which acts as a work surface. Then you get out your bobbins which are finger sized tubs of thread. Depending on the pattern and number of colors you could have as few as 6 or as many as 200 bobins going at once. Then you twist, twist, turn, move some pins around, and presto you have a beautiful handmade lace object. (Actually it looks really complicated, despite the speed at which the ladies do the work). It was a surprisingly popular attraction. There were about 50 women crammed into a small room watching a dozen or so different women
work on these projects. It was facinating.
The lace school here was founded in 1717 by the Sisters Apostelines. They taught lace making and sold lace allowing the girls that made the lace to receive a monthly compensation. It sounds like an excellent way for women to be independent. In any case it is a beautiful craft that allowed Bruges to be the head of the lace making industry for many years.
There seems to be quite a collection of churches here in Bruges, in fact Churches seem to be a focus of European culture. No settlement of people is complete without a shrine to their local diety. In Europe the prevailing religion is Christianity, but it seems like everywhere in the world they build temples, shrines, mosques, and churches. Is there a society anywhere in history of human kind that didn't create places shrines or idols of some sort? The focus is different but the result is the same. Everyone around pours their time, money and energy into constructing these monuments, many of them are all that is left of hundreds of years of culture and civilization. (Think Stonehenge.) I would say that it is lucky that we have
religion to give us an impetus to preserve our culture, but I doubt it matters what the reason is. Human beings like to build monuments. At the end of the day I went for a walk around the moat that surrounds the city to look at the windmills. They really work, at least they were running. Round and Round and Round.
Belfry entry: 6 Euro
Lace demonstration/museum: 4 Euro
Coke Zero: 3 Euro
postcards: 1,50 Euro
Quiche: 4 Euro
crackers & chocolate: 3,50 Euro
Pizza for dinner: 8 Euro
Total for the day: 30 Euro
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jenny's dad
non-member comment
what force made people leave
My visit to Ghent in the 90s made me wonder what conditions were at that time that induce people to leave for north america, and did they have any notion of what they were leaving behind and giving up to live in the wilderness.