Where did all the people come from?

Real travel entry for Bruges

I caught the train from Antwerp to Bruges via Ghent and it wasn’t a bad trip. I was annoyed to find out that you can only use cards to buy tickets from the machines in the stations in Belgium and that I would have to queue up everytime that I wanted a ticket to go somewhere. Luckily I was only going to a few places. 

I wandered a little on the way to the hostel from the station. I turned a street too early and ended up in the grounds of St John’s Hospital but eventually got back on track. I grabbed a better map at the hostel and headed back into town. It had been a beautiful day but it was rapidly getting cold in the afternoon and I was foolish enough to head out without enough clothing which spoiled the evening a little. I took a roundabout route to the centre of town so that I could see some of the famous canals. Bruges is pretty but very touristy and was packed for the weekend. The canals are also very filthy which is a bit of a shame but it seems like that everywhere in Europe. Fishing the bottles and plastic bags out now and then would help a bit.

I wandered past the statue of Van Eyck (who was one of Bruges’ most famous painters) and the theatre and on into the main square with the belfort. The entire square pretty much is lined with overpriced and low quality restaurants with their ‘traditional menus’ so I gave most of it a miss. It’s also where you can get a horse and carriage ride around town which seems to be very popular amongst the Americans and the Brits in the evenings. Another popular activity is a canal ride. Of the 3 million tourists coming to Bruges each year, 1 million of them will go on a boat ride. It’s about 6.50 to go on a half hour cruise with 25 other people all crammed into a large dinghy. You never get to go in an empty boat as they just sit and wait until it’s full before going. They give a commentary as you go around (which they must get so sick of repeating all the time) and it’s really annoying as you walk around as you can constantly hear the nattering. Naturally I skipped the cruise. I did see a man on a cruise with a labrador which seemed to be most interested in the ducks. He had to hold onto the lead very firmly. 

I fairly rapidly passed through the square and into the side streets and towards St Salvator’s church which is one of the other towers on the Bruges skyline. It was nearly 5pm so I didn’t go into the church. I decided that I would wait until Sunday to visit. For some reason parts of the  church aren’t open on Saturdays so if you are coming just for the weekend, Sunday is the day to pick. 

I was starting to get very cold and very hungry as I’d only had some bread in the station for lunch so I started to look for somewhere to eat. I decided on a place called Cafe Passage which is in a side street near the church. Unfortunately the restaurant section doesn’t open until 6pm so I had another hour to kill before I could eat. It was very tempting to just sit in the bar and wait in the warmth but I headed back out into the cold and went sightseeing for a little longer. I headed away from the centre of town and towards one of the smaller canals. It was much prettier out that way and a lot quieter. There were more birds on the water because the tourist boats don’t head out that way at all and they don’t get disturbed every 5 minutes. You can’t walk along the canal here because the houses back onto it but there are a couple of bridges that give nice views. I wandered up the street next to the canal and ended up at another church which was closed. I looped back into the main square and then to the restaurant with a brief stop at H&M (as it was really warm inside). 

I had a nice dinner of waterzooi which is a creamy chicken stew from Belgium. Incredibly it was a meal that didn’t automatically come with frites and I realised that for the first day in ages, I had had an entire day without eating anything that was deep fried. I finished with a waffle and chocolate sauce (another traditional Belgian dish) before waddling back to the hostel to unpack. I then had the horrific experience which is the showers in the St Christopher’s Bauhaus. They’ve put signs up saying that the showers have been designed to save water and energy (ie Money) but that doesn’t explain why they are quite so awful. They were so bad that I didn’t have a shower in the second day at all and was tempted to wash in the basin in my room on the third. They were the stupid push button showers but you couldn’t even count to 10 before the water stopped and there was no way of changing the temperature of the water so it starts off really cold but then becomes scaldingly hot after a little while. The shower heads are also special water saving ones that seem to have about 4.5L/min coming out of them (think somewhere slightly above a trickle). I truly struggled to get my hair clean in the miniscule stream of water. At least the rooms were warm enough that I eventually warmed back up again. 

My second day was really busy as I wanted to get through quite a few museums in the one day. I started with the burg which is one of the squares in the middle of town. I took a roundabout route to get there again, heading first away from town and to the outskirts of the old town. There’s a big dyke with windmills on the top of it. There are nice views from the top of the dyke though the mist stopped me from seeing all the towers. I then headed into the streets again and to the Jerusalem church which was built in the 15th century after one in Jerusalem. It’s a funny little church and was quite cosy on the inside with soft lighting and lots of old stuff. I didn’t get to have a full look around as they were having a service in the crypt. Then I continued on into the Burg.

The town hall is the largest building in the square. It’s got two sections: Gothic/neo-gothic and Renaissance. Next to it is the Church of the Holy Blood which is home to a container of Christ’s blood that was brought back by a knight from the Crusades. It’s brought out at least once a day for people to look at and in the afternoons, it miraculously becomes a liquid again. I decided that I couldn’t be bothered waiting until 11am for them to bring it out and just headed into look at the church itself. It’s built into the side of the town hall and you have to go up a lot of windy steps to get into the building. Unfortunately the church has fallen prey to a very misjudged neogothic redecoration and has very little going for it except for the wooden ceiling. I didn’t stay long until before heading to the town hall. 

You can pay 2 euros to go into the two sections of the town hall or you can buy a Bruges pass that lets you into all the museums for three days for 15 euros. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the pass and paid for this one separately. The pass is really worth it as it includes climbing the belfort as well as all the museums in town and given that the climb is 8 euros by itself and many of the museums are between 5 and 8 euros, you don’t have to do much to make it worth it. 

You can’t take photos in the town hall but you do get a free audioguide that covers the main rooms. Annoyingly, they don’t sell any postcards of the town hall so you can’t buy photos either. You also get a little handout that talks about the facade of the town hall with all its statues. The original statues from the 14th century were destroyed during the French Revolution and the current ones are from the late 20th century. There was much debate as to whom should be on the front of the building. In the end they decided to replace them with copies of the originals. The statues used to be painted but they haven’t done that this time. 

The gothic room is the main section that you get to see in the gothic section of the town hall. It had a neo-gothic renovation in the late 19th century when they converted two rooms into one larger one. All the wall paintings, the windows and most of the ceiling decoration date from then. The paintings are of important events in the history of Bruges with paintings of the important citizens of Bruges and coats of arms above them. Off to the side there is a little room with some dull exhibits about the history of the council. Downstairs are portraits of important royals/leaders in the history of Bruges including Spanish governors, Napoleon and the Austrian royals. There are also some paintings of what Bruges used to look like. 

In the building next door is the renaissance hall which is much smaller. It’s dominated by a very impressive fireplace that covers an entire wall. The room was built in the 1530s as a meeting room and courthouse. The fireplace is marble, alabaster and wood and curves up the wall and onto the ceiling. It has busts of Charles V and his grandparents (Holy Roman on one side and Spanish on the other) and is massively cluttered. It has animals, crests and plants and they haven’t left a single inch uncovered. Below all this clutter is the alabaster frieze which tells the story of Susannah and the elders and it’s held up by very concerned looking putti. The rest of the walls are covered in portraits and the audioguide covers who they are and where they are from. It also explains how the Austrians came to briefly be in charge of what became modern day Belgium. 

Belgium belonged to the Spanish for a long time and continued to be part of it after the Dutch broke away. Charles II of Spain was the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs in the late 17th century and was severely inbred with severe mental and physical disabilities. He died childless in 1700 and Charles VI of the Austrian empire put in a claim for the throne. The Spanish really didn’t want him so in return for relinquishing his claim, they gave him The Spanish Netherlands and the Low Countries and it all came under the rule of the Austrian empire. It didn’t last long though before the French moved in. 

I headed through to the main square to check the opening times of the Belfort for Sunday before heading over to the museum area. The Groninge Museum is part art gallery and part history museum and at the moment has an exhibition about Charles the Bold at the moment. I had never heard of him before so it was good to get a bit of a history lesson.

Charles the Bold was a duke of Burgundy who lived in the 15th century. He had some grand plans and wanted to be a king with a big empire. He had a good go at it but didn’t succeed. His great grandson got there though and was Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Burgundy became part of the Holy Roman Empire when Charles’ only daughter married the son of the emperor and their eldest son went on to marry the Princess of Spain and their son Charles got everything. The exhibition has all sorts of stuff from Charles’ lifetime, his father’s and his daughter’s. There are several suits of armour, some of which look quite ridiculous. Charles the Bold was big on propaganda and there are lots prints and books that show off his impressive army and their equipment. He initially did well in taking new lands and controlled pretty much everything from Burgundy to Amsterdam. He then got a bit above himself and started to do badly. He asked the Holy Roman Emperor for his crown in return for Charles’ daughter Mary marrying the emperor’s son. The emperor thought really hard before saying no and in the end the two children got married anyway (but after Charles’ death). The Swiss joined together against Charles and they managed to take one of his camps and steal most of his weapons and other items from the camp. This is known as the ‘Burgundian Booty’ and it’s the first time that it has been outside of Switzerland in 500 years. 

Charles wasn’t just into war and he is one of the reasons that arts flourished in Bruges in the 15th century. They have some of the items on display in the exhibition and a video of the treasury of the Golden Fleece (a noble order founded by Charles’ father) in Austria. I assume the Austrians stole it when they were in charge a couple of centuries later. 

Mary of Burgundy married Maxmillian and moved to Germany and lived near Aachen. She died young after a riding accident. She was buried in Bruges in the cathedral and her father also has a memorial there. This is where the exhibition continues as the church is almost next door and half of it is a museum. 

I headed through the garden to the church. It’s quite pretty and you pass over a little canal on the way with a cute little bridge (it can be hard to get across due to all the people taking photos). I got to the church to find that it was closed for a couple of hours for a wedding. It would have been nice for them to put a sign up saying as much at the museum. So I headed into the centre of town to get some lunch while I waited. I decided to try the fries out the front of the Belfry as it’s a Bruges institution. There are two stalls out the front of the tower and they hold a lottery every couple of years for the licenses to sell there. There is much debate as to which has the better fries but I just looked at people walking away from them both and decided that the ones from the right (as you are facing the tower) looked crispier. I joined the wrong queue initially (the one on the left is for collection not ordering) but eventually left with my fries (which were still not quite up to Dutch standards). After eating I headed back towards the museums. I still had an hour to go until the church reopened so I headed to the St John’s Museum which is across the road. It’s in the old St Jan’s Hospital which has been on the site since the 12th century and only stopped being a functional hospital in the 20th century. It was run by the council but staffed by nun and for a few centuries also by brothers. They owned a lot of land around the buildings and the town and used this to fund the hospital. 

They have the old nuns’ uniform which they wore from the 16th century through until 1966. It must have been horribly hot in the summer as it’s all wool and has at least three layers. They have a large collection of silverware, furniture and art, much of which was donated by the nuns when they joined the convent. There are a couple of paintings of the inside of the building when it was a hospital. It was a big open hall with rows of box beds through it and big fireplaces for cooking at one end. The nuns lived next door when they weren’t working. They would do operations and other procedures in the empty spaces between the beds. In one corner of the hall was the church and it’s still there. It now houses the collection of Memling’s works including his large altarpiece and the shrine of St Ursula. 

The church was finally open again (though now very full) so I headed across the road to the Church of Our Lady. The front section of the church is open for free but most of the interesting stuff is in the back section where you can’t take photos unfortunately. It’s quite dark inside, so they probably wouldn’t come out all that well anyway. They have quite a collection of paintings by famous Bruges painters such as van Dijk, van Oost and David. You can’t see many of them all that well as they are hung quite high and the light isn’t great. The side chapels have been redone and many are now neo-gothic or are used for display areas. 

Around the far side is the Gruuthuse family chapel (more about it later) which is a wooden chapel that extends through the stone wall of the church. They used it to attend church services without having to leave their own house (church for the truly lazy). In the display sections are the painted graves that the museum found when they excavated the floor of the church. Painting the inside of graves was a trend that started in Bruges in 1270 and spread from there into the rest of Belgium and France. The graves were made of bricks and then plastered over and painted while the plaster was still wet. The paintings were usually of the Virgin and Child, Christ and various angels and flowers. The style was fairly basic as they often only had a few hours to paint them before the burial. They got a little fancier later on as they worked out how to paint the patterns onto sheets of thin paper and then adhere them to the plaster. It also saved them lying in the semi darkness in a pit in the floor of the church for a few hours. 

Mary of Burgundy was buried in the middle of the choir of the church and her painted grave was covered by a large bronze monument to her and her father. It was originally thought that his body had been returned to Bruges many years after his death but no bones were found during the excavations. The museum section also has a scale model of the grave of Mary’s husband, Maxmillian I of Austria which is Vienna. It truly takes the cake for grave monuments in Europe. It has 28 full sized statues of his family flanking the grave in two rows and then another 6 on the grave itself. 

After finishing in the church, I followed the crowds down the street to the Begijnhof which is really lovely even with all the people around. Like the ones in Holland, it was home to a group of women who were nuns without the vows. This one still has women living in it and they were singing their evening prayers when I visited the church. The central courtyard is full of daffodils and looks fantastic. Everyone was ignoring the ‘don’t walk on the grass’ signs to get in amongst them and get a photo. 

I continued out the other side and onto Minnewater which is one of the many parks in the city. The walk along the canal to get there is very lovely but full of people. It seems that this is the route that all the day trippers take to get back to their buses in the car park near the station. There were also lots of the canal boats passing along the first section. Once you get into the park and turn off the main path, you rapidly lose the tourists though and it is much more peaceful. I continued through the park and came out near one of the town gates that sits next to a bridge across the largest canal. Here I turned and headed towards the church of St Mary Magdalene which was closed. It sits on the edge of yet another park but I didn’t head into it. I continued through the maze of streets towards the hostel and to check out a restaurant that was recommended by my street map. I found the place and it looked good but I had another hour until it opened. I was tired enough that I knew if I went back to the hostel and sat down, I’d never get up again, so I continued to walk around the streets for a bit and then sat in a little park next to one of the canals and read for a while longer. Eventually the restaurant opened and I headed in for a very good meal. I had steak cooked over the coals on the large open fire in the restaurant (so the whole place smells of cooking steak - not the best place to take vegetarians!) with about 400ml of Béarnaise sauce (it came in a gravy boat!) and half a kilo of really good frites. Needless to say, I didn’t have room for dessert! Then it was back to the hostel for a wash in the basin (I couldn’t face the showers) and to bed. 

Sunday was another busy day in Bruges and I set out reasonably early to try and beat some of the crowds. It’s actually relatively easy as lots of young people stay out late and therefore aren’t out of bed until check out time in the morning and the day trippers don’t arrive until about 11am. 

It turns out that the Tour De Flanders was starting in Bruges on Sunday morning and that may explain why there were so many people in town. I arrived in the main square just as they were finishing the official opening and then had to push my way through the crowds that were trying to leave the square. I continued through to the museum section and into the Gruuthuse Museum. This is a 15th century house that was owned by a family who became rich on taxes on beer. The museum is being renovated at the moment so only sections of the collection are open. The collection is very varied and has all sorts of items from both everyday life and special occasions on display in a series of small rooms. It covers religious items, silverware, cooking, lace, weights, furniture, tapestries. They have little explanatory pages in each room which tell you a little of the history of the items and Bruges and also direct you one of the other museums in Bruges if you want more information on a particular thing which I thought was a nice touch. You can also go into the chapel which you see in the church of Our Lady and look down into the choir from up there. It’s very plain now as they have taken out all the items except for the prayer stools. Sections of the house were renovated in the 19th century and have been decorated in the neo-gothic style but other sections are more in the original gothic style and the whole place is quite interesting inside and out. 

I walked through past the church again and went to the Pharmacy at St John’s Hospital which I had missed the day before. It’s only a couple of rooms so doesn’t take very long. The pharmacy attached to the hospital was staffed by the nuns and was used until well into the 20th century. The nuns had a book of remedies and were given a small amount of training by a pharmacist from Ghent and then pretty much left to it. One room is set up as the pharmacy used to be with all the giant mortars and pestles and little cupboards for storage. The mortars were made using the same methods as bells so that they didn’t have a seam on the inside. The room next door was predominately used as a meeting room and has some old furniture inside. I didn’t get a very good look at it as the museum was closing for lunchtime (a couple of the less popular museums do this) and I had to leave. I headed back towards the middle of town and got a little lost (though in Bruges, that can be a good thing to do as you get to see lots of interesting things). I had lunch in a little deli and then headed towards the middle of town and the belfort as the weather had improved and I had decided to climb it. 

Luckily the belfort is included in the museum ticket as it’s 8 euros to climb it which is a little steep (no pun intended). I had to queue up for a little while as they only let 70 people into the tower at a time and you end up having to wait for others to come down (I’m fairly sure that there were more than 70 people in the tower with me though!). The climb starts off fairly easy with low steps and wide walls and you get to the treasure chamber which is where they kept the important documents of the city. The gates have 9 locks so that people couldn’t sneak in and steal things. You then continue up the stairs to another large room which gives you the best views of the square. 

From here the stairs become much steeper and a lot narrower. It is quite hard to pass people in some of the places and you spend a lot of time pushing yourself into little doorways to let others pass. It continues like this for the rest of the climb. You do get a couple more stops though. There’s the belfry and then the carillon machine room (where the big metal wheel is). It turns out that I was correct and the carillon plays a slightly off key version of Danny Boy once an hour. I imagine that can be very irritating when there are lots of drunk Irish people around who feel the need to join in. The bells for the carillon are in the top level where you can go and look at the view and they are really quite deafening so if you don’t like loud noises you have less than 15 minutes to look at things up the top. It’s quite cramped in the top level because of all the bells and their supports so it’s hard to get a good look at the view. The windows are also covered in mesh which limits the photo opportunities. Then it was back down the awful stairs (which I think are actually worse on the way back down again) and out at the bottom. I passed a woman who was starting to attempt the stairs carrying a five month old baby in her arms. Luckily, she thought better of it and turned back to wait in the large room before the bad section of the stairs. I’m astounded that the people at the ticket office didn’t warn her about the stairs, you definitely need both hands free to help yourself up them and there is no way that she could have squeezed against the walls while carrying a baby. 

Then it was off to my final museum in Bruges, Our Lady in the Potterie, which is on the outskirts of the old town but in the opposite direction to the way I’d gone on Saturday. I meandered through the streets in the general direction of the museum, passing the poor forlorn looking statue of Hans Memling (it’s shoved in a little ignored square) and ending up on another canal. It was a quite pleasant walk in the sunshine and it only took a few minutes and the streets were almost deserted. 

Our Lady in the Potterie is a museum in one of the old convents and includes the old church that was attached to the buildings. It has a large collection of paintings, silverware, furniture and books from the convent. The place must have been very wealthy as they have some impressively shiny stuff. The church is stunning and is worth a look if you have the Bruges card. It’s in a funny position due to the way it’s been tacked onto the rest of the building. You enter in through the side chapel if you are coming from the museum and it’s quite cluttered (I think that they are using it for storage as well). They have a really bizarre painting of a dead saint that has bejeweled bits stuck onto the canvas. They’ve also got a couple of reliquaries and a large shrine with a lead coffin in it. 

The church is baroque and very flash for a convent church. It’s got a lot of real marble, tapestries, a massive marble altar. The candlesticks in front of the altar are over 6 feet tall and I’m betting are solid silver. Unfortunately, you can’t take photos in this museum either and they only have 2 postcards from this museum in the racks in the office. It’s a bit of a problem with all the museums being run by the one department. They’ve done heaps of postcards of the popular places and none of the less popular ones and just sell exactly the same set in all the museums. 

I walked back into town and to St Salvator’s church to have a look inside. I didn’t get to look at the treasury in the end anyway as the church was closing for a service. I only just got enough time to look around the main body of the church. It’s not that attractive on the inside. At the moment they have a display of liturgical vestments in the side chapels though most of them are from the 18th and 19th centuries. They also have some weird modern art exhibition on. I then wandered around for about an hour looking for somewhere to get something to eat and couldn’t find anywhere that either took my fancy or was in my price range so headed back towards the hostel instead. I had dinner at a little diner down the road from the hostel and it wasn’t bad and was freshly cooked which is always a good start. Then unfortunately, it was time to have another of the hideous showers complete with yoga like contorsions to keep the water flowing long enough to rinse my hair. 

The next morning, I had a lazy start before heading back to the station and on the train to Ghent.