Brugges Travelogue

There is the question of spelling the city’s name: Bruge? Brugges? Brugge? Zelondorf? Turns out that all are correct and pronounced the same way. Except the last one, which I might have made up.

Today is blue skies and beautiful. Today we’re off to Brugges by train. At Brussels Midi train station, we buy a 2nd class ten trip rail pass for 83 Euros. 1st class would have been 123. Any point to point in Belgium costs one trip which we write down on our ticket. Trains to Brugges, sixty miles northwest of here, run about three per hour. We hop the 9:26 am commuter train, and are in Brugges at 10:45. No one ever checks our tickets.

Brugges and Amsterdam both boast to be the Venice of the north. Both are interlaced with and defined by their canals. Both have been important centers of commerce, have beautiful well-preserved old architecture, beautiful grand plazas, throngs of tourists and more. Thus both have valid claims.

A key difference between Brugges and Venice (other than the name, country, language, climate, location, etc.) is that local bridges lack stairs, so they can be biked and driven across. Brugges has cars, but not too many. Venice has none except in one part of town near the station/Piazza de Roma area. 

Brugges is shaped like a misshapen oval and has been for centuries. Think of it as a Dali-clock. The clock bezel is a canal or several of them. The station is at 7:00 pm. The town center is, naturally, in the center of the clock…

Brugges joined the Hanseatic League, which competed strongly against the American League in baseball.

Brugge's population is 117,000 though it’s many times that during tourist season. It’s a World Heritage UNESCO site. Its name comes from the old Dutch for bridge or bridgehead and the town dates to about 850 AD. The city chartered officially three hundred years later and started formalizing the canals and bridges.

Brugges joined the Hanseatic League, which competed strongly against the American League in baseball. No, wait, the Hanseatic League had nothing to do with baseball. Hansa meant convoy and it was a league of cities that traded with one another and had a mutual defense pact. The Hanseatic League reached from Brugges all the way to Poland. It was kind of a NAFTA + NATO for its day.

So there is the question of spelling the city’s name: Bruge? Brugges? Brugge? Zelondorf? Turns out that all are correct and pronounced the same way. Except the last one, which I might have made up.

We’re in the early batch of tourists. New ones would be disgorging from subsequent trains, buses, cars and what nots. We walked toward the town center, quickly amazed at the solid construction and stunning beauty, accentuated by giant planter boxes full of red flowers on bridges.

The canals we crossed were similar: roads on either side, then homes on either side of the roads. In the canals, boats plied with little hurry informing tourists in three or four languages key points of what they were seeing.

The main square is something else. Called simply “Markt” (Plaza, Square, Place, whatever), it’s flanked by a rainbow of guilder houses on two sides with outdoor restaurants full of tourists in front of each. All sell mussels, etc. And tall majestic Gothic buildings extrude into the skies on the other sides.

All the Gothic secular buildings are the result of a strong merchant class expressing itself in the contemporary architecture of the day… They were proud of their wealth, and they didn’t have to rely on the clergy to show off their new status.

The guilder houses with their stairstep facades also demonstrated their wealth. They were the key fobs of their day…

Lunch was at Café Belge, at 14 Geernartstaart, one road north of the main square. It was simple: garlic mussels for my beloved, vegetables in a curry sauce for me. We walked around the canals, and, as we suspected, a few streets north of the main square, the tourists fell away, and we had Brugge almost to ourselves. Then we started heading back toward the center.  

We decided to take a boat ride and met three lovely boisterous Peruvian women seemingly with the endless laughter, enthusiasm and selfie taking capacity of batchelorettes…

We wandered back toward the main square (Markt) stopping first at the De Burg square. The streets were now flooded with a small tidal wave of tourists. Astonishing.

We decided to take a boat ride and met three lovely boisterous Peruvian women seemingly with the endless laughter, enthusiasm and selfie taking capacity of batchelorettes…

The boat ride took 30 minutes. It was too fast for what we covered. At 10 Euros per person, these boats are a mint. A guy next to us calculated each one nets 900,000 Euros a year. Not sure if I agree with that, but I can see where there would be big profits.

The ride over, we bid adios to our three new friends. We have to see Kruispoort Gate, one of the big gates left over from when the city was surrounded by walls that are now long gone. There are also three large windmills up on a hilly grassy knoll. I think people lived in them and the mills could be rotated about a horizontal axis.

Another beer stop at the Vorlorn Hoek restaurant. It has a nice terrace, and the guy who serves us is young, sandy blonde, tall, thin with Lennon glasses… He speaks excellent English and teaches us the meaning of Vorlorn Hoek (Forgotten Corner). 

We find a several centuries old map of Brugge. What we saw were almost all the same roads and canals and main monuments. The only difference we note are the buildings are often different and the outer canal used to be two rings. Now it’s one.

We walk back to the train station and catch the 8 something PM train back to Brussels… It’s an IC (intercity), so it’s more comfortable than our morning commuter and in little over an hour, we’re back at Brussels Midi SNCB station. 

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