In Bruges : February 2016 — Leni on the Road

Day three in Belgium, woke up early because in my head, we had three cities to visit: Bruges, Gent and Brussels. Okay, so long story short, we ended up just visiting the first two mentioned cities because we were too tired, out of money and it was too late (dark and bloody cold, if I may add) to do (more) visits in the capital.

At about ten minutes past eight in the morning, Bagets and I rushed to the train station hoping to catch the 8:34 am train to Bruges. We failed. From T’s place, it was more than a 20 minute walk and we still had to figure out how to work the machine. On the way to the train station, we noticed two things: (1) bikes everywhere (got so jealous because I've always wanted to bike around the city) (2) where and how the hell do we cross the street?

I was expecting to pay about 20 EUR for a one way ride to Bruges after much research. As we couldn’t work the machine even if it was in French, we decided to just catch the next train an hour later, which would mean we would be arriving later, thus spending less time in Bruges than desired. We then turned to the nearby ticket booth where the multilingual man politely asked us where we were headed, informed us that the next train was in 20 minutes, giving us time to have our breakfast at the nearby Starbucks and the best news of all: the tickets only cost 6 EUR each. I said it before and I’ll say it again, being under 26 years of age is the best time to travel Europe with all these discounts (sometimes freebies, too!).

So by 9:20 am, off we go to Bruges! Once there, we visited the city by foot and soon after, by a 30 minute and 8 euro boat ride!

Tight on budget, we wanted to simply get lunch at a small burger restaurant but there were too many people. We walked further into the city and came across this restaurant. Even if we had to pay 40 EUR for the meal we had (it didn’t even feel and taste like how much we paid for), we could at least say we tried the local cuisine. I had half chicken and fries while Bagets had four medium sized meatballs in tomato sauce with fries – Flemish style.

It was past noon, left with almost no money from our budget and full from lunch, we then decided to head to Gent for some coffee and dessert.