We woke this morning, and the weather was cool and windy, felt more like fall here.  I slept well last night but Krista was up and 1:00am and needed to take a melatonin to get back to sleep.

We got up at about 8:00am, and headed out right away, we went for breakfast at a restaurant on the main square in front of the the bell tower, and horse and carriages that offer city tours.  We both had the yogurt with bananas and honey, I had a coffee with that.  So we started the day quite good.

The plan for the day is to do one of the walking tours in Rick Steeves guide.  We started with the bell tower, we spent some time in the court yard and took some pictures.  We then headed to an adjacent square and checked out the city hall, they have a gothic assembly hall and an interactive demonstratation of the history of Bruges, both interesting and well worth the visit.  Definitely gives you some of the history of this city. 

We left the city hall and visited the Basillica  of the holy blood.  Apparently Joseph of Aramathia had brought some of Christs blood here in a vial and for a for a time the dried blood would turn to liquid every Friday for about 200 years, somewhere between 1100AD to 1300AD, the blood did dry up for good sometime in the 1300's.  The Basillica is very gothic, the arches and the paintings and generally the architectual detals are definitely all gothic.  

Next on the adjenda was to finish some of the details of the square where the city hall and basiclla are located and head toward the fish market.  The fish market was a bit of walk, nothing is really far in Bruges, the old city is quite small and only takes about 20 minutes to walk from end to end.  The fish market is only in use four days per week, the rest of the time the space is used by artisans selling their wares.  The market is open air and located next to one of the canals.  Fishers bring their catch up to the market on small boats that navigate the canals.  The rest of the time the canals are used by tour companies giving tourists water tours of the city.  We did not take one of these tours.

We continued our walk toward the BAC (Church of our Lady) we stopped at an art museum that houses some of the best pieces by artists from or worked in Bruges, the Groeninge Museum.  The paintings and sculptures here date back to around 1000 /1100AD to the late 1800's.  We spent just over an hour here taking in some of the art. 

After the tour we continued our walk with the next stop being the Church of our Lady.  This is the central church in Bruges, which also houses the only Michaelanglo sculpture found outside of Italy.  This sculpture in marble is of the virgin mary and child, it is clearly on mark with any of the works by Michaelanglo.

The tour then took us out along the streets of Bruges where we took in shops where Belgium chocolate is sold.  They take this quite seriously, as there are as many chocolate shops here as there are Tim Hortons in Canada.  They are everywhere with multiple shops on a single street.  Each shop has very elaborate displays in the windows, each trying to entice the tourists in to purchase their wares.  We didn't stop at this time as we were getting hungry and needed to get some lunch.

We found a nice bistro on our path, and stopped in for a soup and salad, and coffee.  All good choices.

Our next stop was to find the local brewery, we had a reservation for a tour later this afternoon, at 4:30.  So we walked in that direction to make sure we knew where it was, Following Rick Steeves guide we found the brewery, and continued on to an interesting part of the city where it was managed by nuns.   That ended our walking tour.

Rather than walk back to the hotel, we decided to go back to the brewery and have a drink before the tour.  The brewery (De Halve Maan / the half moon) has an outdoor beer garden as well as a bar/restaurant, so we found a table outside and each had a drink before the tour, their own beer of course, the Bruges Zot.

The tour started on time at 4:30, the guide, Roland was very good, funny and knowledgeable about the brewery.  They are one of the very first and has been and still is family owned and operated.  One very interesting point was that for them to expand and grow they had to start bottling outside of the city, but to do this they needed a way to get the beer to the bottling facilty.  The problem they need to solve is how to get that much beer, about 9 Million Litres from the brewery in the city to the bottling plant outside the city.  Trucks would not work given the location of the brewery and the street that trucks would have to traverse, so they came up with a plan to build a beer pipeline.  So they now have a 3.5kM pipeline that runs under the city to get the beer to the bottling plant.  There is a small section of the street covered in plexiglass at the gate where you enter the brewery where you can see the pipeline.

After the tour we decided to go back to the hotel to take a break before going for dinner.

Dinner at 7:30pm was at den Armand, this is a nice little restaurant off the main square.  Very limited seating so we were lucky to get reservations.  Their menu is quite diverse as it has fish, salads, chicken dishes and spring rolls as a main dish.  So we both had a spring roll.  Now these are not like the spring rolls we have at home, these are large about the size of 4 or 5 of the rolls we get at home, and they are filled with a number of different fillings, I had the chicken with veggies and Krista had the goat cheese with veggies, both came with some basmati rice.  This was excellent and not too filling, we finished the meal with desert, I had the tiramisu and Krista had the chocolate mousse we each had some coffee to go with it.

This takes us to the end of the day.  We walked back to the hotel taking in some of the sites at night on the way.