After surviving yesterday I had a new lease on life and was excited to go explore Bruges. Unfortunately for us, Belgium is located in the centre of the sun and is a fiery inferno. Steph and Dani will verify that this is not an exaggeration as one of them is currently emailing her mother in her underwear and the other has a wet towel wrapped around her head and is "sweating buckets of balls." So it's a little hot.
We visited a monastery first, huge challenge for Steph because she had to be quiet for about ten consecutive minutes. There was an old church from the 1280s which was pretty cool but not a lot else going on. We continued through the streets to the cathedral and then to the town square. When we got to the town square we had a nice lunch and then decided to climb the Bruge Belfry (that means bell tower). The tower had 366 steps in a nice, narrow, steep, spiral staircase and it was approximately 800 degrees the whole way up. Totally worth the hell fire though, when we got to the top there was an incredible 360 view of Bruges and a cool breeze!!!!! We climbed back down, much harder than climbing up, and walked back to a nice little park where Steph and I ate waffles, Dani ate chocolate covered oranges, and I regaled them with fun-loving stories of Nazis and WWII fire storms. Things are always sunshine and rainbows when I'm around.
Our little trip to Bruges ended with a packed train straight into the pits of hell. Also, not an exaggeration. The air was not working and it was so hot that you could actually watch the sweat running down arms, legs, faces, and backs. The chocolate in my bag melted immediately, I'm pretty sure if I had anything dry and not drenched in sweat it would have instantly burst into flames. Thankfully it was only a 50 minute train ride and we all managed to sleep for most of it, mostly because that was our only hope of survival. We got off the train into 31 degree weather and it felt cold after the torture we had just experienced. In all seriousness, that train car was well over 40 degrees and so full people were standing at the doors. Brutal.
We went for dinner and back to Delirium Cafe where I enjoyed a nice Canada Dry ginger ale because I am never drinking again until Barcelona.
Tomorrow we leave Brussels, spend the day in Antwerp and then move on to Amsterdam. Belgium has been great and we all loved it, it just really needs to cool it on this whole 1 million degrees Celsius thing.
Things I ate:
- fresh squeezed orange juice and chocolate twist (also, like a pain au chocolate, just twisty)
- Moules et frites, mussels and fries
- Belgian waffle with bananas, Nutella, and chantilly
- Chinese-ish food
Highlight of the day:
- feeling a cool breeze at the top of the tower
- when Dani told the guy at the hotel "we're Canadian and we just can't do it" so he went and found us a fan for our room
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