Vague thoughts and irrational decision making by a vegetarian who's more than a little interested in cycling and endurance events.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
George's birthday
Suz and Brig were down from Bristol for the weekend-which is always nice.
FYI- that isn't George being drawn on.
Friday, 3 February 2012
Painting, Tintin, fudge and beer
Started off today with a great breakfast of fruit, juice, coffee, croissant, bread rolls, regular bread, egg, butter and six slices of cheese (and one already cheese).
The Groeninge museum contains a lovely collection of Flemish art. I say lovely. The first half is saints, torture, crucifixion and rich people. The second half is modernist work, which is a little weaker. Bizarrely there is a painting of a corrupt judge being flayed alive, which was commissioned for the courthouse for judges to see.
Brilliant lunch. Massive veggie pile.
Then snow. Lots of snow. A bit more snow... And then the Tintin shop. Actually it also has a massive collection of other comic books... Including the complete 'walking dead' in Flemish.
More wandering in the snow followed by coffee, fudge, truffles and a potter back in what, by now, felt like a blizzard.
Dinner and a selection of Belgian beers then home.
City break in Bruges
Travelling by train to mainland Europe is much more civilised than by plane. It took a few minutes to check in and despite the train being faulty we set off only a few minutes late. Worryingly much of the Belgian landscape seems to look like Lincolnshire (where my parents live). I say worryingly, it's only worrying for the Belgians really.
We checked into the hotel (walwyck) and set out on foot for a potter about town. One of the first things we noticed was that it was a lot smaller than it looked on the map. In a few minutes we had covered most of the area we had planned to take a look at. Slowing down a little we decided to look for the tintin shop. We didn't find it, but we did find the cinema, town hall and the tourist information.
Back to hotel to warm up.
All the restaurants seemed to have exactly the same menu. This seemed odd until we realised that not only did the restaurants on one street go through to the ones on the next street, three venues next to each other were joined together inside and appeared to share staff and a kitchen.
Tomorrow we are going to try some old paintings and some pottering.