Hotel Gresham Knokke-Heist

Everyone's been telling me to write an entry, and I really want to but I can't find a caffe with internet in this town. It is too tiny! I'll have to wait to write a proper entry once I get to Antwerp or Bruxells. For now, I'm in Brugge and staying with a very nice software developer who is very talkative despite his thick Flemish accent. It's ha...

I slept really well last night at Johanna's place (yes, I promise to make entries -even if they're short- for past days/cities). Then this morning I took the bus under a light drizzle to the Ghent main train station. There I paid my 6.6 Euros for a round trip (weekend price) to Brugges (Brugge/Brujas), which I had heard so much about.

I h...

Today I said goodbye to rainy, rainy Bruxelles, and took the half hour train (8 euros) to Gent/Ghent, where I met up with my first host ever, Johanna. She was the first couchsurfer to welcome me into her home back in 2007, after I had finished my year in South Korea, in Beijing.

- Before going to Ghent, I actually made a stop in the Music...

brugge is a fifteen minute drive (depending on how good the person holding the map is... and it was me... and i don't read dutch maps well) from the netherlands border. so we HAD to go. another country notched on our belt.

eede is a small town in the middle of flat frosty nothingness. i'm sure in the summer the fields are full and green.....

the dutch spell brugge but the french spell bruges. so what does the english language use? bruges! i find that kind of weird. shouldn't we take the spelling of the locals? we're so silly.

this medieval town (subject of a wonderful movie staring colin farrel) is a bit (as the movie suggests) like purgatory. it's such a comfortable city wit...

Today Jessica, Jake, Alli, and I went for what started out as a walk around town and what ended up as a tour of the outskirts of Middelburg. We walked through this great park Jessica found and sat on the benches for a while. We had lunch at this cute little snack shop by the park. Jake is always the one to try the weird foods, but he got this de...

Gent, despite being a beautiful city all in it's own right, had one specific thing which drew me to it: Van Eyck's "Ghent Alterpiece" This thing has been on more art history exams then I thought possible. I swear, even during an Egyptian art history course, this thing would make it in there somewhere somehow. For that reason, I felt compelled to...

One of the reasons I stayed in this hostel was that it advertised a free breakfast. I was not disappointed. It wasn't really a hot breakfast, but there was toast, drinks, some kind of sugary bread, and sandwich food. Sandwich food meant I made a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. I really don't spend much on food. I've found that a sandwich for ...

The train service in Europe is really fantastic. I'd say they are smoother than riding in an airplane. You can barely feel that you are moving. All of the engines are electric too, even on the freight trains. Some have two levels, but ours was only a single level. There is of course, first class and second class, but I can't tell much of a d...

January 26 - January 29 Alight...I apologize to everyone for not updating this thing sooner, but I have had a million and one things to do and very little access to the internet. So let's see where I left off...I guess it was the interviews etc. So as I explained I had to go trekking all around Brussels going to interviews that I was not terribl...