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April 1998

Brugge

David Aaronson
2005-09-23 22:29:00

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On Wednesday, my conference finally started. Wednesday morning I got up early and went off to the opening speeches, including (but not limited to) eating eel in green sauce (ick). Melanie meanwhile, caught up on her sleep. In daylight, Brugge turned out to be absolutely the cutest, quaintest, most picturesque city possible, starting with the Beguinage shown here. The Beguinage was a sort of semi-nunnery during the middle ages; mainly it was a group of women living together with loose-ish vows that allowed them to leave whenever they wanted (basically a somewhat religious dormitory). Now Benedictine nuns run it and buildings looking just like these form a square surrounding this nice grassy field filled with flowers. At night though, they lock the gates, probably so no one catches them having wild Benedictine parties.

Brugge, which incidentally is the Dutch spelling, and is known as Bruges to the French speaking folk in Belgium, is called "The Venice of the North" according to their tourism bureau. This is mainly due to the vast network of canals that run throughout the city. In the middle ages Bruges was one of the most important cities in all of Europe. Unfortunately for them, the river they were on started to silt over and it became too shallow to be a major shipping route. Instead they seem to have spent the next few centuries making their city really cute.

Here is yet another canal near our hotel. On day seven we take a boat cruise through all the canals and there'll be a lot more pictures of them. You can skip ahead to Day 7 now if you really just can't wait. Just to make it even more unbearably picturesque, Brugge has a local population of swans swimming about the canals. Off in the distance is one of the three very tall things in Brugge. You'll notice at least one of them sticking up in the background of practically every picture. We'll visit them later.

Brugge has two central ...