Part Two: Brugge

After a few days in Amsterdam, doing a couple day trips to nearby Den Haag and Haarlem, we made our way south by bus to Brugge. If you recognize the name from somewhere, it’s probably because you’ve heard of or seen the movie In Brugge with Colin Farrell (which is actually pretty good, I highly recommend it). At first I was really, really unenthusiastic about going to Brugge. I’d already been there once before in summer 2009, but that wasn’t the issue. All I remembered about Brugge is that it was absolutely mobbed with people (I went in the middle of August, right during the peak of the tourist season). I saw and heard zero Flemish in the stores or on the street, and there was absolutely nothing going on in town.

The place felt basically dead, like some other boring, old town that would be totally without merit were it not for all of the other tourists visiting. The huge, major event going on when I visited was a horse and buggy show running through the town square. One of my few distinct memories about the city is that there were so many fat, sweating, fedora-wearing middle aged tourists taking shitty, boring photos with point and shoot cameras that I could barely navigate my way through. I protested a little bit, but Karl and Brendan were set on going, so I went along anyway, leaving my opinion open for change and hoping it would.

And it did. In a big way. Just around the time we got there the weather was getting to be really nice, and when we checked into the hostel we barely even needed sweaters. Brugge in August was hell, but it was absolutely delightful in March. There was actually room to breath on the winding, cobble-stoned streets, and I saw the most incredible, ornate, ancient buildings; buildings that I don’t even remember seeing since I was so busy with searching for a path through the crush of humanity around me, lamenting a day poorly spent on my trip. Brugge is one of the best-preserved Medieval towns in all of Europe, and the personality and beauty of the place is overwhelming. It’s one of those cities where you walk around unsure of what you should even be taking pictures of since it’s all so wonderful. I could try to explain the place away in writing, but I’ll let a few photos do the talking for me.

The central square in town.

The buildings on the left in the previous photo, with the statue in the middle of the square.

A canal towards the south of the city, with a view of the backside of the cathedral tower in picture one.

The hostel we stayed at in Amsterdam was a little questionable and very expensive (I blew about 2/3’s of my travel budget there alone), but we ended up scoring a really nice, reputable, clean place in Brugge with a great atmosphere and really friendly staff.

Since we got in a little late the previous evening, we spent most of the next day touring around on rented bikes through the city, ticking off the sights and taking some photos. One of the great things about Europe is that the whole place is really bike friendly. Even I get annoyed with bicyclers in the USA, but around here people have a lot more patience for bikes—they’re a much more integrated part of the traffic around here, which means that it’s a great way to get around. All of the cobblestones on the street made for a sore butt by the end of the day, but that didn’t detract from the experience at all. It was pretty magical (for lack of a better term) to bike around the city, dashing through little side-alleyways, heading up and over bridges over canals, breathing in the chill air and taking in the sights.

Karl (left) and Brendan (right)

Minor bike disaster on the way out to Damme, fixed in about a half hour with a borrowed screw driver from a fishing shop down the street.

Around 1:00 or so on day two we took a tour of the Halve Maan (half moon) Brewery one of the oldest in Brugge. The tour wasn’t actually very good unfortunately, but at the end we did get a free token for one of the brewery’s beers, which I used on a Brugse Zot. Belgium is famous for its beer (the country puts Germany absolutely to shame), and drinking a beer fresh out of the tap in the very brewery in which it was made was just incredible. That will probably be the best beer that I will ever drink. I tried the same beer later that night from a bottle, and even though it had been brewed and bottled and sold all in the same city, there was already an amazing difference in taste.

It was also in Brugge that I had “The Sublime Moment” of the trip, as I took to calling it. That one little part of the whole experience that sums it up in one beautiful, half-surreal, peaceful moment. At the end of the day we biked out to the nearby town of Damme, about 5 kilometers outside of Brugge. The weather was just a little cloudy and cold, the bike path smooth and straight, running right along a canal that led into Brugge from a nearby river. Damme, although not well known, was almost better that Brugge itself. The town had a nice little center to it, and was pretty quiet and quaint, but the main attraction was the enormous, monolithic 13’th century church lying just outside of the main part of town. Yes, 13’th century, as in the 1200’s. I was floored. With the exception of the Coliseum in Rome, I had never seen an older building. And it was huge—towering way above our heads like some sort of ancient, ruined relic from a long forgotten, vanished civilization. The sort of stuff that Tolkien is made out of. Being three males who grew up in the middle of the videogame era, we of course joked that it looked like something out of Zelda, but we were all taken with it.

At the base of the church on my bike.

A view from the bottom.

It put me in a contemplative, grateful mood, and as we were heading back to Brugge the clouds opened up in the west and we were greeted by a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. Hamburg is cloudy and gray pretty much all the time, and it had been a few months since I’d seen a really good sunset, and it blew me away. I was speaking with Karl later around the end of the trip, and he commented that we had just lived a lot of people’s dreams. Thousands of people will buy the Rick Steves’ Guide to The Netherlands and Belgium, read it cover to cover, fantasize endlessly about making the very same journey that we had just completed, and never do it. We were pretty damn lucky to have the means and the time to go out and do this ourselves, and that good fortune culminated for me with the bike ride back into town. All three of us were spread out along the path, I was in the front, with a rare bit of time to myself to pedal and think, breath and contemplate. Riding through all of those fields, past run down, decaying farm sheds which were probably older than the United States itself, past windmills and villages and with a arrow-straight view into Brugge and this amazing sunset right behind the city, it was nothing less than sublime.

Part One: Amsterdam

Starting on March 3’rd Hamburg had the start of it’s Frühjarsferien (essentially spring break). Back in January me, Karl, and Brendan (two of the other Fulbrighters in Hamburg) put together a trip for the first week of break: Amsterdam for four days, Brugge (in Belgium) for two days, and Brussels for one day. We spent a long time working out logistics and schedules, putting the trip together, planning, etc., and ended up with what looked like a really great trip. When the time finally came we spent the night in Berlin (since our flight took off early in the morning from there), and woke up super early to get to the airport by six.

Intrepid travelers at 5:00 on the subway platform.

The majority of the time when I’m traveling (road trips, backpacking, etc.) I’m usually on my own, which sounds a little lonely, but when you get down to it, it’s actually really nice. I’ve traveled in groups before too, and while I won’t say that it’s ever been a bad experience (we always have fun, and it’s really great to share the experience with others) there’s just a whole different feel when you’re among a few other people. There’s less time to take it easy and really inhale, lift your eyes up from the sidewalk and appreciate what you’re seeing. Wanna sit down on that bench and contemplate the Alps in Innsbruck? Fine. Ride a bike around the Alster in Hamburg in August and find a nice spot on the grass to watch the sailboats? Sure. In a group you always have to come to a consensus, always have to make sure everyone else in the group is ok with what you’re seeing and where you’re going, which makes things a little hasty sometimes, and adds an extra layer of complexity to the whole thing.

Traveling with Karl and Brendan, though, was a serious pleasure. We’d all traveled in Europe before, and had a really good understanding of the do’s and don’ts with this sort of thing—a sense of how to get around and navigate the whole process—which made things so nice.

I never quite know what to expect out of any given city when I visit, but Amsterdam took me completely by surprise. One of the problems with a lot of German cities is that they got bombed totally to the ground in WWII (really apparent in a place like Berlin), but Amsterdam, in spite of the German occupation, seemed all but untouched. Every other building it seemed was about 100+ years older than the United States itself.





Anyway, we got there at the ripe and early hour of 9:00 AM and busted out our patron saint for the trip, Mr. Rick Steves, to do a walking tour of the city. I’d never really used a guidebook in earnest before, but the walking tours we went on in Amsterdam, Brugge and Brussels were all really fantastic. One of the most interesting things we saw in Amsterdam (which we also saw in Brugge) was a Beguinehof (Beguine courtyard). I had no prior knowledge of what the Beguines were, but apparently they were a nun-like group—a very faithful and religious sect of female worshipers who weren’t associated with nunneries or anything. They build Beguinehofs in a lot of cities in Amsterdam and Belgium as refuges from the hustle of city life: places where they could live and pray in peace.

The Beguinehof in Amsterdam was right off of one of the main drags, down this really non-descript, tiny alleyway. Walking in was really breathtaking, it was like someone muted the entire world after walking through the archway to the courtyard. Inside was a wide, open lawn crisscrossed by sidewalks, and around the lawn were the Beguine’s houses, small, white two storey houses with little fenced-off gardens out front. At the center of the lawn was a small red brick church with a bell tower and the classic big wooden gate. The last Beguine died in the 1960’s I believe, so now the houses are used as public and student housing. There was a sign out front requesting that you not take photos to preserve the peace of the place, so unfortunately I can’t share any of my own photos with you.

Another highlight of the Amsterdam trip was the Anne Frank House. On the second or third evening we signed up for a walk-through of the house, and it was really amazing to actually be there and see it first hand. I remember reading that book in the seventh grade and having only a hazy idea of the context the book was happening in, or even the very house in which they hid from the Nazis. And all of a sudden I was WALKING through the secret bookshelf entrance to the hidden annex, climbing the stairs into the upstairs rooms and seeing where the family lived, the pictures and magazine cutouts that Anne decorated her room with, the black curtains over the windows. What really blew me away was seeing the tick marks on the kitchen wall which marked off Anne and her sister’s height as they were growing, Anne was maybe four or five inches shorter than me by the last marking.

Over a canal in the Jordaan neighborhood.

Whoops.

.....and then visitors happened! I got all in the mood to start writing again, and then this past week I had a whole blitz of visitors who I had to entertain and show around town (two weekends ago my friends Willie, Shannon and Casey, last week my Dad and Stepmom). Well, I shouldn't say "had to," I really enjoyed it. But, of course, sightseeing and catching up leaves little time for writing.

But I am firmly dedicated to a crazy writing blitz these next couple days, in which I hope to get through spring break and the past couple weeks. So here we go.

Prelude: March 2011

Well beloved readers, it seems we’ve fallen into the cycle of blog writing I seem to get into again and again: write, stop, feel guilty about stopping and start up again. During the holidays of course I didn’t want to spend my time pounding out entries on some hostel computer when I could be exploring cities, but now that I’m back in Hamburg I can sit down and tell you all about what I did during the break! Three weeks worth of stories and pictures, it may be a bit of a challenge (big writing projects like this make me a little apprehensive), but we’ll give it a shot.

Anyway, as I said, I got back into Hamburg about two weeks ago. In total I was on the road for twenty-one days, which translates into four countries and eight cities. I rode bikes through medieval cobblestone streets in Brugge, sat on the edge of canals and ate sandwiches in Amsterdam, hiked in the Sierra Nevadas in Granada, laid on the beach in Nerja, and had the honor and privilege of attending the annual Fulbright Conference in Berlin. Even though it was only three weeks and not a whole month of traveling, the trip was just a fantastic time. Three weeks takes a toll on your body and wallet though—even now I still get random pains in my knees and feet walking around the city, and I was living out of my change dish for the last week and a half of March. I had a tremendous amount of fun, however, and got to meet, visit, and travel with a huge variety of great people.

Anyway, let’s start from the start, shall we? Part one on the way.