I decided to get up a littler earlier today and actually have breakfast for the first time on this entire trip since I didn't really eat dinner the night before. The woman running the dining room at the hotel is from Australia and kind of gave me a hard time the day before about skipping out on breakfast and reminded me I had already paid for it so I should make sure to come down and eat. I'm glad I did because I was much hungrier than I realized. Plus I'd been missing out on lots of great meats and cheeses and breads for breakfast since leaving Berlin.
After breakfast I just took my time getting ready to head out.... loaded my photos from my camera onto the computer and onto a backup hard drive I'd brought with me, and ran through them really quick to see if I had gotten any good photos from the day before. There are a lot of photos I am sure I'll always like because I was here, but not nearly as many that would make for good "artistic" kind of shots although I do have an idea with some of them that might really make them fit the mood of this city. I was certainly more in tourist mode the day before and I could see in in my photos. That's not always a bad thing through.
I decided to start the day by heading over to the museum and checking out the Salvador Dali exhibit even though the only real art by him that I knew was his famous melting clock stuff. I'd seen some of his other work before but not enough to where I could have picked it out in an art book if it wasn't captioned. Needless to say, if you've ever seen his paintings, etchings and sculptures before, he is a little out there sexually in his work. There were some pretty strange and interesting concepts in his work and he had a number of different series that were all pretty cool to see together. You could really see how his work changed over time and even over the series he would be putting together. I enjoyed the show a lot, but was disappointed to see that in all the work they had displayed there, the melting clocks were not included. I was really looking forward to seeing them in person, but maybe some other day.
The Winter Fest started here today and all the little booths were open around the square so I wandered around checking out what they had for sale and enjoying watching all the people that were here today. The square and streets were a lot busier today for sure... and I'm not sure how much of that had to do with the Christmas Festival starting and how much was just because it as Friday night and the weekend was here. There were a lot of tourists from England here for the weekend from what I could hear and with the Chunnel now, it's a very easy and cheap trip for them to make. I was jeaslous thinking about how easy it would be to travel to a new country every weekend now that the trip across the English Channel was about 2 hours now.
After I started to get really cold walking around I thought it would be a good time to jump on the City Bus Tour and take the 45 minute ride around the city to hear what I may have missed and learn some of the history here. If you've never been to Bruges before, let me just say that this is a tour you can really skip and not miss anything. For the money you pay, you can buy a book abound the city and see and learn so much more just walking around. I was disappointed, but at least I'd warmed up a bit. I just wandered around pretty aimlessly the rest of the day here, and after looking at my Fitbit realized that my day of leisure still had me walking just over 9 miles.... so much for resting my poor feet. Since this was my last night in town and I'd seen pretty much everything I wanted to, I headed back to the hotel early to pack my stuff back up since I wanted to try to sleep in tomorrow. Bruges was very cool and a beautiful old city, but I can see how this is one of those places you would have more fun with if you were with someone special. There is a romantic feel to the city that you just can't take advantage on by yourself. LOL
Tomorrow is a travel day ... leaving here and heading to Heidelberg. I'm going to try to make the best of the day on the train to just relax and catch up on some reading and maybe even watch a movie or two. It's been weird not watching TV for almost 3 weeks now.
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