Brugge and the infamous Belgian Coast

On the Sunday I woke up after 8-9 hours sleep feeling like I’d had 4. This is when I start to realize that my cold is still getting worse and not better – very disappointing! We left at 9 for Brugge, about an hour and a half away from Brussels. Our three-car convoy disbanded early in the trip, and we were left with just GPS Bonnie on our side and the vague goal of finding ‘the church in the middle where you can climb up the stairs to the top of the tower’. We did surprisingly well.

Our first impression of Brugge was pretty hilarious though – while walking from our car to the ‘square in the middle’, Kinga and I found out that there are boy racers in Brugge too. But they play a slightly different kind of music to the hip hop or dance music that you hear blasting from the subs in NZ cars. I am absolutely, 100% serious and not telling a lie at all about it when I say that the boy racer was playing excessively loud….. yodel music. I’m not kidding! Honestly! Kinga will back me up on this. It was the most surreal moment of the entire weekend…


By this time Milli and Kilo were already at the square. Eventually the Saffa-van arrived (Cath, Claire, Cat, Gareth and Jen). They were held up because they were too stingy to pay for parking!

We had a great breakfast, with most of us ordering Belgian waffles (some with ice cream – me!) and a couple of bacon and eggs orders. Kinga ordered a ‘large’ ginger ale and ended up with over a litre of it! He barely made a dent in it.

Brugge is as cute as a button. It is so quaint and pretty.

We walked up 366 steps to get to the top of the bell tower in the centre of the square. At the top you can see for miles. There was a bit of fog (or was it smog) so it wasn’t perfect visibility but it was still an amazing sight to see all of Brugge. It is much bigger than I originally thought. All these little orange houses, stretching out for miles.

Some of the others took a horse carriage ride through the streets. Jen, Gareth and I missed out because we were standing in line to get some fries with mayonnaise (oopsie daisy!). And we saw this giant chocolate stuck to a car! Honestly, it was real chocolate. I touched it. So I hope no one actually eats it - imagine how many hands have touched it!!!



Then Milli proposed a trip to the Belgian coast.... evidently lots of people that she has been working with told her that she absolutely had to go there. So we picked a place that looked like it was on the coast and got GPS Bonnie to guide us there. Unfortunately we picked bad, we got to this port town which had a tiny beach but no restaurants and barely any carparks. None of us could get a carpark so we just called it a day and headed back to our respective homes. The Amsterdam crew stopped off in Eindhoven at my favourite restaurant there, Memories (just for old time’s sake). We finally got back to Amsterdam just in time to pick up Cherilyn from the airport, fresh (haha) back from the London Waitangi Day celebrations.