When Amy came to Belgium

Amy has been over here in Belgium for the past 4 days, so we did a bit of sightseeing. I've already posted 2 posts below about Gent and Brussels, this one's about Brugge and Oostende. Also, I'll put up all my photos on my flickr site, so don't forget to check there too! (link is to the right of this page).

We decided to check out Brugge for part of the day, and then travel to the coast so Amy n Mish could meet the North Sea. Brugge is a really lovely place, but also very touristy and hence fairly hectic.

Because I'm never normal

We kicked off our morning by visiting churches and the swans on the canals. (Remember my earlier posts about the swans in Brugge?? The Brugge people rioted against their French King and killed his adviser/best friend whose name was the French word for ‘long neck’. The people demanded more freedoms and rights, and the King agreed on the condition that the people not kill him, and also that they keep and tend to the swans that lived on the Canals, in memory of the King’s adviser ‘long neck’ – y’know, because swans have long necks! Apparently there was a big problem recently when avian flu came to Europe as all birds had to be caged by law, but the people of Brugge felt they had to still keep their historical duty to the swans, so they built cages over the canals for the Swans to live in and stay on the canals.)

We then went on a beer tour of a local brewery!! It's still right in the middle of town (see photo above), and is called De Halve Maan (The Half Moon). It's the last brewery left in Brugge, and apparently they have downsized a lot and only really keep it going by running tours through the place. Glad we could help by learning about beer! Plus, the tour came with a free taster...

And a great view of Brugge from the top of the brewery!

Did you know that Belgians make beer in champagne bottles up to 16 litres?!?!

The brewery also had a collection of beer cans from around the world, although NZ's representatives were not particularly impressive and included goram DB!!

We had our free taste of Brugse Zot (a blond beer 'the fool of Brugge'). Pretty good!!

Had a look in the Tintin shop (Tintin being the creation of Belgian artist Georges Remi)

Wandered along the canals

Then we moved on to Oostende in the afternoon.

Oostende is a coastal town, lots of fishing going on there.

Had a squiz at the beach, though it was fairly windy and cold (North Sea can get a bit rough!)

Then we headed back to Gent to have a canal ride in the early evening, seeing as we had missed out the day before. It was fairly good value at 5 euro for 45 min cruise!

It was cool for me too as I hadn't been on the canals before, so I got to see some familiar monuments (like the Castle here) from a different vantage point.

This is Gent's version of the famous Manneken Pis. Apparently it was around long before the tourist-pulling one in Brussels, and I think he is way cooler because he's got flowers too. No peeing boy statue is complete without flowers. Ok so maybe I should explain the peeing boy fascination of Belgium (I only just learnt about what it means). Back in medieval times they used to use the urine of young boys to soften leather, as it was more pure than the urine of all the beer-drinking adults. So young boys could earn a bit of money by selling their pee to leather merchants etc. Just as an aside, apparently the water supply from the canals was so bad that the people of Belgium drank beer instead. Even small children. So this is why they had to resort to using the urine of REALLY young boys, because once they were old enough to be weaned, they would have been drinking beer like the rest of the population!!

So, we ended up seeing 3 cities in 1 day. Bit of a whirlwind, but a great day!

Here is Hamish with his 17 cent (I kid you not) pudding. We even managed to work a dessert into the modest travel budget!!