City break in Bruges

This morning Sophie and I set off for a short break in Bruges. If I'm honest the only real information I had about the city came from watching 'In Bruges' and an interview with Colin Farrell where he said it was boring. So the decision was made in our usual slightly haphazard way.

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.