Belgium, Part 3: Bruges

As if doing Brussels and Ghent both in the same day wasn't exhausting enough, at about 7pm on Saturday we got on a train in Ghent and approximately 25 minutes later, arrived in Bruges, where we spent the night and all day Sunday, before getting on a train and backtracking all the way to Paris that evening.

Bruges is a canal city with a port linking it to the English Channel way up in northwest Belgium. It experienced a "Golden Age" from the 12th to the 15th centuries and was one of the greatest economic centers of the world at one point. Nowadays, only about 20,000 people live in the city, which makes it feel very small and intimate; everything we wanted to see was at most a five-to-ten minute walk from everything else we wanted to see. There were very few cars and a great many chocolate shops.

And I loved it. I would go back in a heartbeat. Yes, you can do and see pretty much everything Bruges has to offer in about a day (and believe me, we basically did it all in a day). But it's just so damn charming. It also helped that we had PERFECT weather on Sunday.

We began by walking from our hostel to the historic city center (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) that evening. Our route took us down along the main canal and past the main church in Bruges.

The sunset hitting the church of Our Lady as we walked to our hostel from the train station.

Walking along the main canal at night.

The famous belfry in the old town square.

One of MANY chocolate shop displays. I WANT ALL OF THIS.

A cafe we passed.

Following the advice of one of the other students, about five of us and my professor wandered way off the main streets to find this restaurant of super traditional Belgian food. I was surprised to find that food was MUCH cheaper in Belgium than in Paris. I had an incredible dinner here, including soup and salad, for nine euros. NINE. 

It was an adorable, TINY place.

The next day we were up early and headed first to the Groeningmuseum, the premiere art museum in Bruges. Most of the art dates from the Renaissance, and the museum has an excellent collection of paintings from Flemish Renaissance masters.

The main reason we visited this museum was to see what is probably Jan Van Eyck's greatest work (the same guy who did the altarpiece in Ghent). The Madonna with Canon van der Paele was completed in 1436 and features the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, St. Donatian and St. George, and George van der Paele, the man who commissioned the work.

This doesn't do it justice by a long shot. It's a pretty big painting, about 48 inches high by 62 inches wide, but it starts to get REALLY impressive once you get up close. Van Eyck was master at painting different kinds of textures. This painting features different kinds of cloth, carpet, metal, marble, stone, fur, and jewelry, and Van Eyck is so good that you swear you could reach out and feel all of those different things.

St. George and George van der Paele. Look at how the light gleams off of St. George's armor...

St. Donatian. He holds a wheel with lit candles because after he was martyred, his body was thrown into the river Tiber in Rome. His supporters sent a wheel with candles along the river and it stopped over the exact spot where his body had come to rest on the bottom.

All along the hem of St. Donatian's robe are saints that are so detailed we can actually identify who they are. From what I can tell, this is probably St. John the Evangelist.

The top of St. Donatian's staff. This little bit of the the staff is maybe only four inches high, but look at how detailed it is!

Close-up of the Virgin's hem and the carpet her throne sits on. See how the carpet bends and cracks at the stair? And how the light reflects off of every little gold bit of her hem?

Okay, I'll shut up about this now. I think this stuff is absolutely fascinating and that the level of talent someone needs to have to do this just blows my mind.

After the museum, we went over to the little square that is just next to the main old town square where the belfry is. The smaller square is dominated by the old City Hall: 

It was built in the late 1300s, and the city of Bruges has been governed from this building for almost 700 years.

The cute (VERY old) little buildings next to City Hall.

The view of the belfry from in front of City Hall.

The leftmost part of City Hall, whose facade was redone in the Baroque era.

We went into that Baroque part, where you pay two euros to see the sights inside. "The sights" consist of a single Renaissance-era room that used to be where the magistrates held court. The reason they can get away with charging admission to this room is the fireplace, commissioned by...I believe Mary of Burgundy? It's carved entirely out of wood and features Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the middle. It's basically one of the most impressive works of art I saw on this trip.

The fireplace alone, from floor to the top of the black marble mantle, is taller than I am.

Saw this hanging outside a souvenir shop. It's in a little kid's size, otherwise I would have been SERIOUSLY tempted to buy it...

After City Hall, my professor took us on a boat tour through the canals of the city! This was one of my favorite parts of the day. The sun was shining, the air was perfectly crisp but not too cold, even when we were chugging along in the water, and the views of everything from the canal were wonderful.

I got bored during our wait to get on a boat so I took pictures of the nearby geraniums...

Across from the dock where the boats picked up and dropped off is the old St. John's Hospital (which now houses the Memling Museum, which was the last major thing we visited in Bruges). My professor told us that hundreds of years ago when the hospital was actually in use, this covered bit was like the "emergency room entrance" where they brought sick people in by boat (often the fastest way to get people to the hospital). If you were being brought into this entrance, you had to have been in pretty bad shape (and were thus basically screwed).

That tiny little window is the smallest gothic window in Bruges. Compare it to the normal-sized windows near the bottom.

I've noticed that I tend to take pictures at an angle tilted ever so slightly to the right, no matter how hard I try. Weird. Anyway, that status in front of the church is of Jan Van Eyck. He lived and worked in Bruges for much of his career and they are very proud of that fact.

After our lovely little cruise, we had about an hour and a half to wander around and explore by ourselves, get something to eat and get some handmade Belgian chocolate. My professor led us to her favorite chocolate shop (otherwise it would have been IMPOSSIBLE to choose which shop to go into; their chocolate all looks so yummy...). Right next to it was this tiny little counter-service place that a couple of my friends and I went into while everyone else went into the chocolate shop. And yes, I took a picture of my lunch, BUT THAT'S ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS THE MOST AMAZING LASAGNA I'VE EVER HAD. Five euros, y'all. Amazing. Also, the can of Lipton iced tea? CARBONATED. WHAT. (Also amazing, actually.)

Pictured: DELICIOUSNESS. 

The chocolate shop, from which I bought many, many scrumptious chocolates in flavors like hazelnut,  violet, green tea, orange, strawberry, cherry, Peruvian dark chocolate, and rum. All of which were incredible.

Their Halloween chocolate display.

Went back into the place I'd gotten the lasagna from a bit later to get a real Belgian waffle. Covered in real Belgian chocolate.

All of us met up with our professor at the church across the street from St. John's Hospital. We went inside for the express purpose of looking at this Madonna and Child sculpture:

Why this sculpture? It was done by Michelangelo, and is supposedly the only sculpture of his that traveled outside of Italy during his lifetime.

The triptych altarpiece of the church.

In front of the altarpiece are the tombs of Mary of Burgundy (on the right) and her father. The plexiglass in the floor in the corner reveals some of the REALLY old tombs from when the church was first built, with some comparatively crude drawings of common religious images on both the outside and inside of the tombs.

We then went into the museum that's inside the hospital, dedicated to all of the art and artifacts used when the hospital was actually still a hospital. They didn't have had antibiotics to make you feel better, so they did the next best thing: they commissioned lots of paintings of Jesus, especially on the Cross, along with lots of depictions of martyred saints. Images of their sufferings were meant to be reassuring and reminders that even if you never got better and died, the Kingdom of Heaven awaited you! Although I don't know how effective that really was...

If you were too sick or injured to get to the hospital on your own, but your situation didn't warrant or allow for you to be picked up by boat, you could get carried to the hospital in one of these, which I think is AWESOME. They aren't very bit, though. Only about as tall as I am, maybe a bit shorter.

A reliquary, meant to hold the bones of St. Ursula and some of those of the more than 10,000 maidens that were supposedly martyred along with her when they were attacked by the Huns. Her story is depicted on the sides: here you can see her ships being boarded by the Mongols, and all the way on the right the leader of the Huns tells Ursula he will spare her if she will marry him. She refuses and he's about to shoot an arrow through her heart. What a fun bedtime story, right?

We walked through this peaceful little wooded area called the Beguinage. It's surrounded by buildings used by the Beguines and was similar to a nunnery, but wasn't completely shut off from the outside world the way traditional medieval nunneries were. 

The very last thing we saw in Bruges before heading back to the train station was the lake that feeds the city's canals, known as the Minnewater, or the "Lake of Love." Which conveniently comes complete with its own picturesque lakeside castle: