Blogs from Brugge, Saint-Raphael, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France, Europe - page 15

After a relatively good night's sleep, it was an fairly early start for our mammoth train journey from Barcelona to Annecy. We had to run to make the train - again. Davies then asked me,"Listen, can you do me a favour and just get up 15 minutes earlier? I'm sick of running for these bloody trains." Haha. He obviously doesn't know me well enough. I did feel bad, and of course he has a point, so I will try in future. But those of you who know me well also know that my best friend is the last minute, and that we go way, way back...will some things ever change? When I say that our train ride was mammoth, I wasn't kidding. In total we had to stop 4 times - in Cerbere, Narbonne, Avignon and ... read more

Belgium - country of cheese, fries, chocolate, and all those other artery clogging treats that help you meet an early death. I didn't think my trip to Belgium would be so food-filled, but thankfully I was happily mistaken. I'm in Belgium as part of the Interspeech 2007 conference, an annual event that brings together speech scientists from around the world. Its a 5 day series of non-stop talks and paper sessions where speech geeks get together and get excited about the latest ways to model our vocal tracts. Belgium is a bi-lingual country, split into a french speaking east and a flemish speaking (almost dutch) west. The conference itself is in Antwerp, apparently the 5th biggest port in the world, and also the name of a curious bagged-shaped mythical creature from Hero's Quest (PC game from ... read more

Our guidebook called Brugges overcrowded and a tad fake but with charm. Although Brugge was undeniably crowded when we were there I still found it to be one of my favorite places on our whole trip. Brugge has a lot to offer. It has a lot of history, museums and tours, tons of shopping, resturants, bars, bike trips to the country side (we were going to do this but got rained out) and festivals. During our 3 day stay we did a brewery tour, went to a chocolate museum, took a horse and carriage ride, window shopped and at night enjoyed the festival and belgiums wide variety of beer. We also spent a lot of time with group of Aussies and Canadians that were staying in hostel. On a negative note our hostel might top my ... read more

Got up this morning around 8am. I had packed a lunch last night for everyone so we just had breakfast and got ready to go. Caught the 9:18 bus to the train station and met the Clausen family Christian, Zoe & Henry). We ended up buying a 10 ride train ticket for 69 euro and sharing it with them. This ride would have cost us about 31 euro total, but with the pass worked out to be about 28, so we saved a little something. We caught the 10:02 train to Brugges. The kids had a good time on the train. Little Henry is in love with Abigail. Zoe told me that everyone at day care knows all about Abigail. So cute. We played Uno and one of the Haba travel games, this one with the ... read more

Europe 07Erin Fisher Well Well Well... ( this may not be so interesting as I just sat here typing you all a beautiful entry and then lost it after 30 minutes of creating it... ugh) So I will spare you the details of my travels yesterday, but after 24 hours of it I arrive in Brugge, Belgium. The city is covered with beautiful buildings, canals, museums, chocolate shops, wafles and frites. I arrived last night and took the bus to a hostel that was according to the internet had about 20 open beds, yet arrived to a full house and had to try another, that too was full. While walking the streets and thinking where will I sleep tonight, while the wind was blowing in my face and the drizzle from the days rain was falling, ... read more