Food in Bruges - and additional thoughts on the Netherlands

This weekend we went to Bruges for one night. Bruges is a small city in Belgium about a 3 hour drive from our house. We had hoped to go for their holiday lights displays, but Alex got sick the day we were supposed to go in December, so we had to cancel.

It was cold in Bruges - 0 degrees C - but we had a nice time. We started our trip by going up to the top of the belfry.

Some of you might remember the belfry from the Colin Farrell movie In Bruge. Here is a scene just outside the belfry from the movie. We sat on that same bench before going up into the belfry.

Here are some pictures from the top of the belfry.

One of the main reasons we like going to places like Belgium is the food is much better there than in the Netherlands. For dinner we went to a cozy little restaurant where we had beef stew and rabbit stew that had much more flavor than anything we can get in the Netherlands.

Here is a picture of us in the restaurant with the very friendly proprietor.

For lunch we had a delicious cheese fondue and pork tenderloin. We savored every bite since we knew it would be a while until we had flavorful food like that again.

And it wouldn't be a trip to Belgium without partaking in the yummy Belgian waffles. Luckily, we can get fairly good waffles here in the Netherlands. People tend to eat them as snacks. When we get back to the states, the waffles here will likely be the thing I miss the most.

To get out of the cold, we took a class on how to make truffles. Truffles made from Belgian chocolate shouldn't be missed and making them ourselves was super fun.

You can see our "classmates" hard at work behind us.

Bruges is known for its amazing architecture - it was one of the cities that was left mostly unscathed in WWII. Here's a picture of our car in front of one of the government buildings. You don't get many buildings like these in the US.

Now that we are settling back into life after the holiday break, I have some observations on the Netherlands. First, Europeans (and Indians) are quite a bit slower to move past Christmas. In India, the last hotel we stayed at had Christmas decorations and Christmas music going through the day we left (January 5th). In Bruges there was still a lot of Christmas decorations up (Jan 18). It feels like in the states the stores rush into Valentines day as soon as Christmas is over. It's not like that here.

Second, I am surprised by how little sunlight there is every day. Sunrise today (almost a full month past solstice) was 8:40am. I was thinking the sunrise would get earlier a lot faster. I'm guessing it won't be long until the sunrise is a more reasonable time, but it is surprising to me how late it is still.

The other observation I have is that there are no squirrels in the Netherlands. I'm not sure I've ever been anywhere that had no squirrels. Maybe it's because there are no snakes, so the squirrels overpopulated to the point of extinction? I mostly notice when biking or driving - in the US I tend to worry about hitting a squirrel. You never have to worry about that here.

Over Crocus break (mid February) Alex will go skiing with his school in Austria and Mike and I will take advantage of Alex being gone to go to Madeira, Portugal. We'll be dreaming of good food until then....