August 9 - Margaret's Birthday

Well one of these years I may be too embarresed to post my age, but it hasn't happened quite yet. Today was my 29th birthday =). We began the day by waking up at 4:30 am (ughhhh!) and heading to the train station to get to Brugges in Belgium, we arrived around 11 am. After a bit of laundry we headed into the main market square for lunch and sat on the square, people watching and enjoying the tasty local brew and a latte.

We walked to the Church of Our Lady and saw a beautiful sculpture created by Michelangeo, one of his only sculptures to leave Italy during his lifetime. It was a beautiful Madonna and baby Jesus statue, and powerful too, leaving the whole area of the church where it is kept in quiet contemplation.

After the Church of our Lady we began to eat locally made chocolate We still haven't stopped eatting chocolate, but I'll probably be sad when it's all over. It's much cheaper, and much much tastier than Godiva, I am in chocolate heaven. It's impossible to pick a favorite, because they are ALL my favorite, I am so glad that Rick Steves has a 'chocolate' section in his book on Brugges.

We took a cruise of the canal in the evening and learned about the history of this port town. Sean and I find it interesting that it had it's hayday about the same time as Hoi An in Vietnam, and the same thing happened to both cities, the entrances to their harbors silted in and the cities were left like perfectly preserved time capsules.

For dinner we went to a lovely restaurant where we had a GIGANTIC bucket of mussels with a garlic/onion/celery/wine/mustard sauce, their special of the night. Sean and I shared, and Joel still had to help us finish it! We also tried more localy made beer (you will notice that this will be the theme for the next few days!). As a perfect way to end a birthday we went in search of a place where we could get some chocolate mousse for dessert. We walked by this lovely old tavern, and went in to look at their dessert menu. Unfortunatly they had NO chocolate on their dessert menu so we handed back the menu and told the hostess that we needed chocolate for dessert and would have to look elsewhere. And then she informed us that they just happened to have some extra chocolate mousse left over from their lunch menu and that she could give it to us at a discounted price (CHA CHING!). So I ate mousse with my right hand, and drank my super-girly, super-tasty raspberry ale with my left! Sean and Joel both had more local brew of a different variety than we had had before.

In short, here was the theme of the day = Cheese + Chocolate + Beer