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Published: April 30th 2009
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Well, well, well...after my birthday we moved onto Bruges (You may have noticed Smicy has gotten sick of doing blogs so you'll probably notice a decline in the quality of them, sorryyyy).
Bruges is a small, medieval city. It consists of old medieval style buildings, chocolate stores, brewery tours and LOTS AND LOTS OF MUSEUMS...COUNTLESS MUSEUMS...which we only noticed when we were walking around. They have a potato museum, a lamp museum...why? Potatoes I can understand because they freakin' love potatoes and fries but lamps? Hmmmm.
We were both getting pretty sniffly and cold filled by this point so we spent most of our time in Bruges resting up and wandering around slowly haha. Bruges is super small though so it didn't require much of our energy.
The highlight of Bruges was going to The Chocolate Line. The Chocolate Line is the home of chocolatier Dominique Persoone who (to put it simply) is extremely talented and awesome aha. The Chocolate Line is one of the 3 chocolate stores featured in the Michelin Guide, which is a very prestigious honour for any restaurant to have and perhaps even more so for a chocolate store. It's very fancy pants and
la-de-da.
Chef Persoones philosophy as taken from his website (http://www.dominiquepersoone.be) is:
* Taste and aromas are central
* Open mind
* The right balance
* Top quality ingredients
* Origin chocolates
The display in their window is to die for, I'll let the photos speak for themselves but it was pretty mouthwatering.
We got 3 chocolates each. Smic got cola, chilli and caramel. I got pistachio, hazelnut and one that had a very long name but I recognised the word "Ganache" in it. Do you know what? They only cost us a few euro and we didn't get snobby customer service like I thought we would! We even saw Chef Persoones in the kitchen making chocolate!!!
Smic:I had three very different chocolates... Cola was strange, the fact it fizzes in your mouth and tastes pretty similar to coke is crazy considering your eating chocolate! Chilli was what i expected but still awesome, nice chilli flavour with a kick at the end. Caramel.... do I need to explain???? Yes as a matter of fact i do... it was incredible, I love caramel but this was on a whole other level!!!! It
was gooey and so tasty! The perfect chocolate!
Bee Dandy: The pistachio part of my chocolate was amazing. Unfortunately it had almond paste in it, which I don't like. The Hazelnut took you through at least 3 different levels of flavour and texture, the last level just filling your mouth with thicky gooey hazelnutty goodness. My last chocolate had a layer of ganache as suggested but when you bit into it a sweet, almost lemony flavour and goo came out of the top. It was awesome. I have never tasted chocolate as intricate as that before!
After that we walked around most of Bruges and looked at the medieval style buildings and neighbourhoods, it only took us a couple of hours. We had a squiz in the Tin Tin store. After that we just chilled out in the "Markt" - the main sqaure, which I think is the cool hang out for school kids during lunch. As nice as looking at buildings was, we decided to say see ya later to the museums and history and go and find some mini golf or something.
We ended up finding a mini golf place on the internet that is
dinosaur themed and UV so all the holes are made to light up in UV. Now THAT sounded like fun! We were so excited we even changed into white t-shirts so we could look all rave and stuff :P We set off to Blankenberge which is a beachside city about 20 mins away from Bruges.
Now it turns out Blankenberge seemed to be pretty much deserted in the cooler months. We wandered through the empty streets towards mini golf for about 25 minutes before we found it and realised it was closed. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. We ended up looking for "Aqualand" because they also had mini golf but after the 10th sign of "Aqualand 10 minutes" or "Aqualand" and a stupid, little arrow pointing towards freakin' nothing we decided to go home. We must've walked for over an hour. Blahhhhhh.
Smic created a theory that they advertise attractions on the internet to attract tourists to their town and make a deal with the train company that they get money from our train tickets. So when we get to Blankenberge there is nothing and they've made money from our tickets. He reckons behind the mini golf door, there is just an
empty space where they hold their scamming meetings. Hahahaha, this was quality entertainment on the way back home but the afternoon had still been crappy. Oh well, we ended up going home and eating lots of food yum.
Smic I hate Blankenberge with all of my being.... If there is a gate way to hell, it would be in Blankenberge!
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