We were taken in by the old Main Square and its ornate buildings.  Statues carved into the stone and gold leafing were our first glimpses of continental Europe.

This is Manneken Pis, a statue and fountain of a little boy peeing. It is a huge tourist attraction (who knows why!).  He is dressed up in a costume that is changed regularly; when we saw him he was dressed up like Dracula.

We went to the Musical Instruments Museum (MIM).  None of the plaques were in English, so we simply enjoyed looking at all the different instruments and plugging our headphones into all the listening stations. 

And, of course, we got some Belgium waffles before leaving the capital city of the European Union.  Yum!

That evening, we took our first train ride of the trip to Bruges. We had gotten a Eurail pass – which I would highly recommend, though it does depend on your trip.  The specific one we got gave us 5 “Travel Days” (unlimited number of trains in 24 hours) over 2 months through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Germany.  Perfect!  It definitely saved us money instead of buying the tickets individually – it paid for itself through Germany alone.

But anyway, Bruges is a sort of small port city in Belgium.  It’s absolutely beautiful, charming, and fun.  It was one of my favorite places on the trip!  We went to the Diamond Museum where we saw a cutting and polishing demonstration.  We were mostly impressed by the presenter’s ability to switch between English, French, and Dutch!  We also hit the Chocolate Museum, where we saw some more demonstrations and ate some samples.

We took an eventful tour of the city one afternoon, but mostly we walked around and explored on our own.  Above are pictures of the Belfry tower.  We woke up early on our last day in Bruges with the intentions of climbing the steps inside to the top, but were surprised to see this when we got to the main square:

A stage that had been used for a concert the night before now hosted what we think was the region’s cycling team! Despite not knowing exactly what was going on, it was a fun surprise.

Our tour guide had recommended instead of climbing the tower to take a tour of a brewery in town, which not only included an awesome view over the city that rivals the Belfry’s but a free beer at the end of the tour. So we did this instead, where I learned that in the olden days, Belgians used to preserve the summer fruits by leaving them in alcohol.  This results in delicious cherry flavored beer.

This is another one of Bruges’ squares. The first building is the town hall and the grey building on the left in the second picture is a church that has a vial of Christ’s blood.

We saw a lot of the sights from the movie In Bruges which was cool–including the park in the picture above!

Along the river there are several windmills. On our last day, we walked around the park and went back through town a different way, seeing a different part. In general, it was the perfect place to just wander around and find interesting places and pretty sights.