Well just cos I can I popped over to Belgium for the weekend with Mum and James! I love how you can just do that from London! We caught the ferry from Dover to Calais then hired a car to drive to Bruges. Bruges is a lovely city, so beautiful with sweet looking buildings, canals running through it, cobbled streets and it's so clean. There is a real sense of pride there. We were walking into the main square and almost straight away got hooked on their gorgeous chocolate. White chocolate with a pineapple cream centre - delicious! We wandered the [View Full Entry]

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For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the name of this blog has a double meaning as it is also named after the recent movie namesake ‘In Bruges’ starring Colin Farrell. In the said movie he says about Bruges ‘If I'd grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me, but I didn't, so it doesn't.’ Despite this less than glowing recommendation, I loved the town and it sits firmly at number 1 of my favourite middle sized cities/towns, in between Rome as my favourite big city and Monemvasia as my favourite little town. Leaving early [View Full Entry]

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Belgium has proven to be quite the surprise packet. The country is famed for the quality of the home made chocolates and beers, which guarantees a special place in the hearts of male and female travellers. The most impressive feature for us, however, is the beauty and elegance of the architecture as we strolled around the cities. It all adds up to a superb travel package, and Brussels is also the home of the European Union parliament ensuring the country is at the heart of what is happening within the EU. Belgium is a somewhat surprising detour, when the plan for [View Full Entry]

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527 miles later and nearly 12 hours of travelling and we arrived at our planned over night stop just south of Namur in Belgium. All went pretty well although a few minor worries with the van!!!! Hopefully she will be ok! Got to the site at just after 9pm and found the reception shut!! Got hold of the man and he told us he was full.....Doh! He recommended another site and we eventually found it after some looking and it is lovely. In the woods with a pitch by the river. Really friendly owners and really tasty beer!!! Looking forward to [View Full Entry]

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London to Ypres: July 23-25. It was great to be able to use some accrued leave to travel to Europe with Mum and Dad and then spend a further four days with them in London. First thing Wednesday we caught the Eurostar from the new St Pancras Station to Lille, where we picked up a rental car and drove across the Belgium border to the small town of Ypres. On the outskirts we stopped for lunch by a quant church in Hollebeke. Suprisingly, the villiages in Belgium always looked really desserted. Dad did well navigating the motorways given our manual car, [View Full Entry]

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hi guys its us again speaking to you from paris. you may be confused. so were we. well like trav and jas we forgot our dour tickets and travs interailing pass in france. dour was amazing espically ice cube for us and the mass amount of drum and bass. well i kinda realised i wasnt really a camping person espically after seeing the toilets. arrrgghhh it was a nightmare. the weather the ok rained quite a bit. we met up with loads of our home friends and uni which was a right laugh and now we are shattered after having many [View Full Entry]

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While traveling around the world we choose our destinations to give us great memories of this epic journey. Most times we will pick winning locations, other times we pick some less than desirable locations. Brussels falls into the latter category for us. We board the train in Paris and head towards Brussels. The train ride is quite nice and we take full advantage of our Eurail Pass and sit in the first class section. After a relatively short train ride, we arrive in Brussels. Our arrival date is the 18th of July. Stepping off the train, we give ourselves a few [View Full Entry]

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I have been in Belgium now for four days and tomorrow leave for Den Haag (The Hague), Netherlands tomorrow. Seems only befitting that I will be out of the country on THEIR national holiday, like I did for France (was in Lux; returned to Lille, FR the day-after). Belgium is truly bilingual, and I've got neither French nor Flemish (AKA Dutch for the most part, with a national twist). But this is high tourist season and I have found English speakers in both Bruges/Brugge (that bilingual thing extends to how they name their cities, train stations, and street signs, too) and [View Full Entry]

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Oh my gosh--I was on Brussels 88.8 FM Radio, for a LIVE interview yesterday! I had just barely made it into the town center after getting off the train from Bruges, checking in at the youth hostel, and walking into the very fun "Use-It/Tourist Office for Young Travellers." There was a party going on in there, or at least the four people inside were super jovial and had apparently JUST moved their offices into the formerly-next-door-library's archive storage room (operation was previously headquartered in an out-of-the-way town called Ghent). A young woman working for the radio station was in t [View Full Entry]

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FANTASTIC festivals & parties :D! Seriously though, I do believe it's the oldest city in Belgium. Medieval through & through. [View Full Entry]

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