Sorry for the long delay in logging in! It's been difficult finding Internet cafes in the small towns we've been visiting, and with the new year and all, a lot of places haven't been open. Even here in Strasbourg (big city in France), we had to try three places before finding one open on a Sunday. Plus, I've got this French keyboard that takes me forever to type on!
Anyway, we left off in Amsterdam, where we had planned on leaving for Maastricht the next day. We actually never made it to Maastricht. Toli wanted to see the dams built in the lower part of the Netherlands (on the Western part of the country), so we ended up driving through there until the late afternoon and then decided to take the tunnel across to Belgium, where we ended up in Bruges!
Bruges is a little medieval town in Belgium that's a huge tourist attraction because it's still well preserved from it's heyday as a cloth capital. We made it into the city pretty late, so the rest of our evening was spent scrounging up a hotel room and then collapsing into bed. The next day was spent properly exploring the city and enjoying some of the delights it offered.
Let me tell you, Belgium is very underrated. They seem to offer the best of all the countries around them: fabulous chocolate (French influence), good beer (German influence), and yummy cheese (Dutch influence). They say in Belgium that the food is as good as the French but in German sized portions, which we can easily believe. Besides, what's not to like about a country that serves frites (fries) with every meal and a small bar of chocolate at breakfast every morning?
We ended up switching accomodations to a cozy little pension (with two resident cats, we found out!) where we spent New Year's Eve huddled up in our room with an enormous picnic dinner. It was a quiet way to ring in the New Year, but with all that we've been doing lately, it was just what we needed.
We awoke to snow falling outside on New Year's day but managed to rouse ourselves out of bed to explore more of the city and eat more of that delicious food (a great incentive for us!). We did a long walking tour of the city, which was kind of quiet and charming as most of the shops were closed.
The next morning, we decided to spend just one more day in Flanders, so we ended up driving to nearby Ypres. We took a detour to drive through Gent, another medieval town, where Christine discovered the sinful delights of Neuhaus. The most famous of Belgium chocolate candies (they call them "pralines") come from Godiva, but Neuhaus is supposedly better(and a tad more expensive). For anyone on a budget, Leonidas is another famous chocolatier that produces some very fine chocolates as well!
Then, we drove to Ypres where we stayed in this little pension/B&B run by this little old lady. It was literally like staying at Grandma's house! We spent the evening walking around the city, ate yummy kebabs at a nearby restaurant, and then walked to the Menin Gate.
For those of you who aren't up to speed on your history, Ypres is a well known battlefield area from WWI. The city was literally razed to the ground from all the shelling and fighting, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides died in the fighting in and around the area. The Menin Gate is a large memorial constructed to the memory of Allied soldiers, inscribed with some 50,000 names of those who died. It is a really sobering monument, especially when you realize that all the names on there are merely a fraction of those who died in the Flanders fields. Every night at 8:00pm, buglers play "The Last Post" at the gate in honor of the soldiers.
Appropriately, there's a WWI museum (called In Flanders Fields, after a famous wartime poem) in Ypres, which we visited the next day following breakfast at "grandma's". As people who enjoy visiting museums (and who both have worked in one at some point or another, even Toli!), we were both completely blown away by the magnitude and presentation of the In Flanders Fields museum. It was put together very recently in 1998 and very successfully integrates movies, high-tech computing, audio-visual, and other media elements with WWI artifacts and diaries. It is truly an interactive museum, and we were lost in its exhibits for most of the morning and afternoon. And afterwards, we completed the experience with a quiet visit to a cemetary outside the city where a number of British (and Commonwealth) soldiers were buried. There are dozens of these cemetaries in and around Ypres.
Then, it was a mad dash of sorts to get to Strasbourg, which was a good 400 to 450 km away. We had fallen a bit off our original itinerary, so we had to make up some distance to get here. Anyway, the story of that adventure (including a very entertaining meal in Luxembourg City) will have to wait until the next entry!