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Beautiful Bruges, what a surprise! Probably the second most romantic city I've ever been to (still doesn't surpass Venice where Dale proposed to me). Like Venice, Bruges has canals and lovely old buildings. Unlike Venice, Bruges has horse drawn carriages clattering along the cobbled streets and the smell of waffles and melted chocolate throughout its centre. There are also lovely green areas where weeping willows lean out over gently lapping waters in which white swans glide. It is a very walkable city and Dale and I managed to cover most of it in a day and a half. Our favourite discoveries were a peaceful beer garden where we were able to peruse an astonishingly large Belgian beer menu and finding that by 8pm the streets were virtually deserted so we could stroll the gorgeously lit streets in peace!
The beer garden was attached to Cafe Rose which was decorated with red roses hanging from the ceiling. The friendly barman was able to help us with the daunting menu (where to begin?!) and soon Dale and I were sipping a dark ale from the tap which tasted surprisingly fruity and contained 10% alcohol(!!) as well as an amber coloured wheat beer created accidentally due to the addition of over-coloured malt (but a happy accident since the result tasted delicious)! For our next round I ordered something called femme fatale (a blond beer) and Dale chose 'Delerium' (which had a pleasant coconut aftertaste). Dale's second beer was another one with quite a high alcohol content (8.5%), so by the time we left the beer garden he was acting quite tiddly! Luckily I still had enough of my wits about me to navigate us back to our budget hotel. (So budget that the ensuite is actually in the bedroom!)
During our three days in Bruges we didn't make it to the Chocolate museum (although we ate more Belgian chocolate), we didn't make it to the frite museum (although we ate some Belgian frites), and we didn't make it to the diamond museum (...No, I didn't get a Belgian diamond). Instead, we did a tour of Flanders Fields. The tour took a full day and included visits to German and Commonwealth cemeteries and memorials, the museum at Paschaendale, recreated trenches, bomb craters, the museum at Ypres and the Menin gate.
Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and gave us a detailed overview of the First World War and the fighting on the western front. It was fascinating to learn that even 100 years later, Belgians are still unearthing so many unexploded WWI shells that each Friday the latest cache is destroyed by the bomb disposal unit! Even more eerie is the fact that each year the Belgians find the remains of around 60 WWI soldiers - these remains are then transferred to a cemetery, and if identified, then the soldier's name is wiped off the list of the missing. (The most recent discoveries included remains of two Canadians and a Kiwi). It was difficult to imagine the idyllic country scenery as the scene for so much human misery and loss of life, but it was certainly sobering to see the number of cemeteries dotting the landscape. The first cemetery we visited was a German one where over 40,000 were buried (including 25,000 in one mass grave). It was a grim place with black stone slabs bearing the names of the dead (the Germans were not permitted to use the colour white in their cemeteries since they were the 'bad guys'!). The largest commonwealth graveyard in the area, Cot Tyne, was very different. There each soldier had a neat white gravestone. If the body had been identified, then the gravestone bore a name. If it hadn't, then it simply read "A soldier of the Great War, known unto God". There were flowers growing about the place, a monument in the centre, and the far wall bore the names of soldiers whose bodies were never found or never identified. A section of the wall was reserved for the names of New Zealanders - there were a shocking number of these. Still more shocking was the Menin gate which bears the names of over 55,000 commonwealth soldiers whose bodies have not been recovered or identified.
We had a lunch stop in Ypres - beer, ham, cheese, salad and frites - then carried on to the Flanders Fields museum. The museum was crowded, so it was sometimes hard to get close enough to read the explanations of items on display. But overall, very interesting to learn more about life in the trenches, gas attacks, the nationalities of those fighting on the front, and the kit the soldiers were issued with. In one corner we found a photo of a smooth faced young Kiwi soldier in uniform and we read that he had been executed for mutiny. After all the harrowing material we had seen, it was easy to sympathise with this serious looking youth and his horror at the wasteful loss of life occurring all around him. During the battle of the Somme over half a million allied soldiers were killed in a matter of days. At the end of the exhibition was a list of all the armed conflicts that have occurred, and are still occurring, since the end of WWI. Looking at the lengthy list it was ironic to think that the so-called Great War was supposed to be 'the war to end all wars'.
Our visit to Bruges finished with another evening stroll through the picturesque streets and another Belgian food experience - fondu! (Ok, so maybe not a purely Belgian food experience, but certainly something they specialise in). Dale was delivered a simmering cast iron pot of oil sitting atop a small gas burner. The oil was seasoned with herbs and using the long slender forks provided, Dale dipped in raw pieces of beef and held them in the bubbling oil until cooked to his liking. Surprisingly the meat was not greasy, but sealed on the outside, juicy in the inside, and tasted faintly of the herbs used in the oil. Delicious!
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