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| Erin's Journal for 10-11-02 This morning I woke up feeling not too great. My cold was getting worse, and when we had our sparse breakfast downstairs, I ate very little. The weather wasn't bad out, so we debated going for a bike tour, but in the end I was too tired and we ended up talking for a couple of hours to another couple staying in the hotel. They had a double room and recommended it, so we switched rooms to get out of the noisy 7-room dorm and moved next door to the doubles. Mindy and Alex were also from the states, and had been travelling around Europe for almost 2 months. They planned to take a very similar trip to ours, with a few deletions and additions, so we had lots to talk about. They too were planning on taking the bike tour, and agreed they'd go with us on Saturday if I was feeling better. We parted ways then, and Glenn and I went out to walk around the city a bit and find a map at Information. Bruge has a lot of medieval style to it still, due to its history of being a boomtown port almost 700 years ago, then suddenly losing its status, nobles and money when its harbor silted up and the ports moved westward. No further expansion or updating was done, and the town remains much as it looked hundreds of years ago. Great sense of character, and still a small town feel. The weather was a bit cool to be walking around with a slight fever though, and after we got our map and wandered a little bit, I was ready for lunch and a nap. We found a sandwich place after exhaustive searching, and took our baguettes back to our room to eat. Then we both fell asleep for a couple of hours, and when Glenn woke up he let me sleep on while he went to check out an internet cafe we'd heard about. It showed promise of being the first place we could hook up all our equipment and hopefully get some stuff up on the website at long last! When he came back around 7:30pm to wake me, he was triumphant, having transferred our photos over to the hard drive and prepared our way to getting some serious work done the next day. I got up and we walked around the square a bit looking for a likely dinner prospect. The food was all pretty expensive, even the normally reliably cheap Chinese restaurants, so we finally settled for a place advertising a daily special with crab cocktail, salmon or steak, and dessert for only 12,50 euros each. We ordered one of each, and were pleasantly surprised at how good the food was. It was a more expensive meal, but well worth it. We went back to the room to read and crash out again with more Nyquil for me. |
| Bruge canal and cathedral tower |