Thursday: Visiting the Churches

I had to cut short yesterday's post because it was after midnight and Kathy wanted me to turn out the lights and get to bed. Here are a few more tidbits about the bell tower. Here is a picture of the gear-works that drives the pulleys and hammers.

Here's a picture of the bells with all of the cables connecting them.

Here are a couple of pictures of the city from the top of the bell tower.


Of course, after all of that work, we needed some refreshment and a rest. Fortunately right in front, on either side of the ancient entrance are two Flemish fries trucks doing a brisk business.

All that was left was to find a nice place to sit and enjoy them. (We tried the "cocktail sauce" which is spicy ketchup and mayonnaise this time. It wasn't as good as the ketchup and mayonnaise combo from last time.)

The Rest of Brugge
The bell tower and Flemish fries took most of the morning, but we were still ready to go, so we headed off for station 2: the City Hall and the Church of the Holy Blood. We walked around inside and looked at the old paintings (Napoleon greeting the mayor of Brugge). Outside, the front of the building was decorated with golden statues.

Kathy especially liked the gargoyle "hitching posts" where you could tie up your buggy while doing your business with the city.

Here's another City Hall detail, a lion and a bear, that Kathy wanted me to shoot for Houtik K.

When we went to enter the Church of the Holy Blood, (the next step on the guide-book tour), it was closed for lunch, so we continued on to the Tanners square, which was previously the headquarters of the Tanner's Guild. Around the side of the square are several bas-relief panels detailing the tanning process.

Just beyond the square was the original fish market where the boats would tie up and sell their wares.

In the middle ages, Brugge was a thriving port; now the sea is ten miles away. The canals still remain, though, even if the biggest catch is now a boatload of tourists, which can be carted away by carriage once they've been landed.


The canals also provide the picture-postcard views that Brugge is famous for. Almost everyone who visits takes a picture that looks a little like this:

Further down the road we skipped the Groeninge and Gruuthuse museums and crossed the bridge leading to the Church of Our Lady where the last rulers of Brugge, Mary of Burgandy and her father Charles the Bold were burried in 1482 (before Columbus sailed for America).

Here's a picture of Kathy standing in front of the church.

The church is most famous beause it has the only Michelangelo statue to leave Italy in his lifetime. He created this at the same time he was working on his famous David.


Before dinner, we headed back to pick up the Church of the Holy Blood, built in the 1200s at the time of the Crusades. (There are actually earlier monuments in the basement of the Crowne Plaza Hotel. When they were building the hotel they discovered the remains of the first settlement at Brugge and the remains of a Carolingian-age church from the time of Charlemagne.)

The Church of the Holy Blood was built to house a relic (a vial of Christ's blood) brought back by a Bruggian knight from the crusades. Every year there is a procession where the blood is venerated. (It's next week.) The church itself is DiVinci-code-like; it looked a lot like the Crusader ruins we saw in Israel. Here's the view of the Basillica.

And here's the main church that houses the relic.

As with the Shroud of Turin, you don't actually get to see the relic. Instead, it is placed behind the silver alter shown here. (The city of Koln, not so far away, has the skulls of the three wise men, but you can't see them either.)

Winding Down
It was a long day, walking through all of the city. Tomorrow is a travel day as we get up and head for Paris. Because of the wind, there were fewer tourists in town, and the restaurant we planned to eat at was closed. We had seen some school kids eating at a take-away place, and so we showed up just as the owner was closing and got some sodas and spaghetti, which we ate on a bench in the park.

On the way back to the hotel, we saw this window which reminded me of Kathy's mom, Rose Eileen.

Of course, the perfect way to end the day would be with some Flemish fries, but the stands had all closed. We had to make do with second best: Belgian Waffles.