1250 cigarettes, and 1 smiling baby...

Ok, so we left Brussels and went to Brugge, which was a bustling merchant town in medeival times and survived the bombings of the wars completely unscathed. Before I talk about our journey, I'd like to share some observations about life in Beligum:

1) The weather changes every fifteen minutes (or at least it seems to this time of year) - It cycles between cloudy, rainy, cloudy again, and sunny. But it's above 10 degrees, so it sure beats Edmonton....

2) Flemmish is an odd language - I think it's a combination of French, German, Dutch, and English, and you can kind of firgure out words when they are written... but not be able to pronounce them. For example, on the train to Brugge, the sign showing the next stop would say "We Komein Ann In" and then the station name.... so it kind of looks like "We Coming On In".... which has been the source of some running jokes between Neil and myself for the trip so far. So if you use your imagination, you can at least almost figure out what it says. But most people speak English as well, anyways.

3) The term "difficult to get to" means something completely different here - Someone basically apologised to us because our train from Brussles to Brugge required changing trains in Gent. So the trip took an hour and a half instead of an hour.... These people are spoiled.

Back to our journey, in progress:

So..... we got a train that we thought was heading to Brugge via Gent, but none of the stops advertised on the sign in the train looked correct. So we got off at the first stop, caught a train back to Brussels, and then discovered that we were, in fact, on the right train. So we waited 10 minutes for the next one. The train system is so good that we only really lost about 25 minutes, and it's not as if we were pressed for time.

In Gent we changed trains and had to sit on the floor at the end of the car because it was full. A family with a baby shared our compartment, and for some reason, the baby would not stop looking at Neil. Probably hates foreigners.

Brugges is neat. We showed up on Thursday night and grabbed a couple of hostel beds (which were only 14 euro... cheapest so far) and apparently we were kind of lucky because May 1 is a national holiday, and there are carnival rides, and parades all over the country.

We stood around a watched the (first hour of) the parade in Brugge after eating our picnic lunch in a bus shelter to avoid the rain. At first, we couldn't figure out what the parade was about, because all of the acting (yes, this parade had acting, and told a story) was in Flemmish, and there were a couple of camels for some reason. Eventually we realised it was a brief renactment of the entire bible... and then, after Jesus came back to life, they started in on the medeival history of Brugges.

Oh, and someone in front of us had bought (no joke) 5 cartons of 250 cigarettes for a total of: 1250 cigarettes. They must be good.

Or addicting.

But we realised that that's about 20 cigarettes a day for 60 days. An expensive and dirty habit, that forces you to buy comical quantities of cigarettes. There's enough second hand smoke around here, I don't know why you'd bother buying your own...

We got bored, so we decided to walk around. I have some good pictures of the town. Actually, the other reason (... ok, the main reason...) was that we had no place to stay for the next night, so we checked all of the hostels.

All full.

Fair enough. The holiday caught us off guard. We'll check tomorrow, or go stay somewhere else in another town.

We whiled away the evening in a pub that boasted, a drink "menu" (which was abut 30 pages long) and boasted 400 different kinds of beer. We sampled about 5 of them before returning to our hostel for another night. The plan for tomorrow is to bike the town... and find a place to sleep.

The next day brought an unexpected adventure....

P.S. Feist songs play in subway stations, the radio at this hostel is playing Tegan and Sara. Wild.

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