chocolate, beer and waffles!

We decided at the last minute to cut one night out of our stay in Colonge, and head to Brugge, Belgium for one night before Colonge.  Since we booked our hotel the night before, we didn't have much of a choice.  We ended up booking a hostel mentioned in our Rick Steves book.  I am going to email him and tell him to take this place out of his book!  It was creepy!  It was located at the top of a bar, like many hostels are-- not a problem, we thought.  You check in at the bar area, and then go through the side door and through this darkly-lit maze of stairs up to the rooms.  Hard to explain, but it was just weird.  The shared bathrooms smelled of urine.  Luckily we were just exploring the town and only there to sleep one night.  We got up at 6am Saturday hoping to get out and take some pictures of the town at dawn.  But we could not get out of the hostel!!  The entrance/exit doors were locked, except for the emergency exit, which would set off an alarm if opened.  We were locked into our dark, creepy hostel.  Isn't that strange?  After an hour of wandering through the maze of hallways looking for an unlocked door out (with no success)  & knocking on the door for someone to let us out, someone cleaning the bar finally opened the door for us around 7am.  The sun was already to bright for good pics though.

dinner

Despite the negative hostel experience, Brugge was great.  Beautiful weather, chocolate shops on every corner, and very pretty buildings.  I think it is one of the few towns that was not hit in the war.  I thought Amsterdam was pretty, but Brugge was even more charming.  The locals seem to really enjoy tourists and many went out of their way to help us with questions.  We mostly just wandered around the town, and then we had a nice dinner that night.  Also visited the brewery there and did a tour.  A few pics below:

cafe in market square where we had dinner

belgian waffles

canal

climbing up the bell tower

a view from the top of the bell tower