Bruges and Paris and London, OH MY!

Paris was amazing (obviously).  London was spectacular (of course).  But Bruges?  Well, that was the best of the three. “Bruges?”,  you ask.  “Where the hell is that?”, you follow up.  Well, if you had asked me a year ago to name all of the cities in Belgium that I could, I would have quickly listed Antwerp and Brussels, and then, dumbfounded, I would have stared into space for a minute or two before conceding that I was indeed done.  But thanks to a tip from our friend Mark, we stopped in Bruges for four nights.  And now I can say with absolutely no hesitation, that if you are planning a trip to Western Europe, you should put Bruges at the very top of your list of destinations.  I don’t even know where to begin with this place.  So I won’t.  I’ll begin before it. 

My last post, not counting the sitcom bonus post, ended in the Netherlands.  So I’ll start there.  We left Amsterdam and Haarlem and drove through Delft, Holland.  This is the town famous for its blue and white painted ceramics.  You’ve seen ‘em.  They’re world famous.  Yawn.  Not my cup of tea.  But we heard the town was worth a visit, so we went anyway.  It was pretty sweet.  The square was lively and the architecture was unique.  It was quaint all around.  Oddly enough, the most memorable thing we did there in our two hours was eat lunch.  We skipped the French cafes and the Dutch pancakes and opted instead for a cheap chain restaurant called “Bagels and Beans.”  Carol and I got something called bagel tapas, which was really a plate of seven different bagel topping choices, such as an olive tapenade, or garlic hummus, along with a basket full of bagel bits.  I’m going to open a franchise in San Rafael when we get back.  It was really, really good.  And so obvious!  What self-respecting Marinite wouldn’t want that?  But bagels aside, Delft was worth the couple of hours we invested in it, but wouldn’t have been worth much more than that.  So we continued south.

Fooling around with the Delft China.

Delft architecture.

Carol's favorite painting is by Vermeer, who is from Delft. This is just a photo I took of a cardboard print of the painting outside of a shop in town (hence the bricks). I included it for two reasons. First, to tell the sad story that we had gone to the museum in Holland where this painting is supposed to live, just to see this one portrait, only to find out that it was part of a traveling exhibition that happened to be in San Francisco while we were in Holland. But alas, it will be gone by the time we get back home. The second reason I included it was to provide meaning for the photo below which made me smile.

The bagels were better than the art on the walls of the bagel shop.  Can't blame them for trying though.

One more shot of Delft.

We decided to add an hour or two to the trip and drive along the coastline of Holland, just to get the scenic views.  If you check a map and look south of the Hague, you will find many islands separated by fjords at the edge of the North Sea.  Connecting those islands is a series of super long bridges that seemed like they might sport some nifty scenery.   But sadly, I was so wiped out that I fell asleep for most of it (don’t panic, Carol was driving).  She tells me I didn’t miss much, but the next time that I request we take the scenic route, I’m driving.  Carol would have rather just taken the shortest route possible.  Then there was Marge, our eccentric GPS, who led us on a crazy route through northern Belgium, a route which often didn’t even exist.  We had to feel our way along itty-bitty roads through itty-bittier towns just to stay near the arrow that Marge displayed on our map, which if we followed exactly, would have put us mostly in cow pastures and swampland.  But we did eventually make it into Bruges, despite Marge’s help. 

Carol dropped me and the kids at the door of our new apartment, along with all of our luggage, and drove off to find a temporary parking place.  We moved in.  I even unpacked the suitcases and put away the groceries.  Still, Carol hadn’t shown up.  I decided to go out looking for her.  I walked about eight blocks and came back and still no Carol.  Great.  Sadly, to put it kindly, Carol doesn’t have much of a sense of direction.  She is good with maps, but if she has to follow her nose, things can get ugly fast.  Carol had no map.  She also had no cell phone, so she wasn’t going to be able to call me for help, and she also wasn’t going to have internet access.  Although I’m not sure that the internet would have helped in this case, as I had all of the contact information for the apartment;  this being, of course, one of the five or six places out of the eighty we’ve stayed in, that I actually did the booking.  Carol did have Marge.  But I was worried that she had forgotten the name of the street that our new place was on and so couldn’t get help from the GPS either.  The roads twisted in and out with no real grid at all to make for easy navigation.  Not that this would have helped Carol much considering her complete lack of an internal compass.

It had been almost half an hour since we’d seen her.  Panic hadn’t yet set in, but my blood pressure was rising.  I left the kids at the apartment, in case she did find it, and I started to spiral out first three, then four blocks from the place, looking for a red car or a curly brunette, whichever came first.  I found neither.  I made one more trip back to the apartment.  If she still wasn’t there I was going to put plan B into effect.  Plan B was first to panic a whole lot and then to call the Bruges police to put out an all-points bulletin in search of my lost bride.  Plan B was not necessary.  She was sitting at the dining room table.  Her memory is twenty times better than mine, and I should never have entertained the thought that she would have forgotten a street name.  So Marge could have pointed her in the right direction at any time.  It seems that parking was a bit of a bear.  She was never lost.  At least that is the story she’s sticking to.  It occurs to me now, that she really didn’t even need to find a parking spot.  Once I had the luggage and the kids in the apartment, I was ready to go.  She could have just circled the block once or twice and picked me up.  But hey, I’d been sleeping in the car all day.  I needed an excuse to get my heart rate up, right?

Old town Bruges is not a place for tourist’s cars.  So we had to drive to the train station and park the car for the four day duration and then take a bus back to our apartment.   That was simple enough.  We even got free bus tickets.  And now we were footloose and fancy free for four fun-filled days and nights.  Time to do some research and find out what this town had to offer!  There was so much to see and do that I wish I had a week.  Every little corner of the town was worth a visit, if not because it contained some gem of a statue or a super-cool building, complete with unique Bruges architecture, that I just couldn’t get enough of, then because it contained another chocolate shop that begged to be sampled and compared with its competitors.  Carol actually promised the kids two pieces of chocolate at every store they could find on a map.  I think we did eight shops (well, the girls did, the boys bowed out on a few of them) on that little treasure hunt.  Carol now gets a little nauseous every time she eats chocolate.  Coincidence?  I’m not so sure.  But wow, is Belgian chocolate worth getting sick over!

Chocolate!

Biking out of Bruges.

We did a walking tour laid out by good ‘ole Rick Steves, the Europe guidebook master.  We rented bikes and not only rode around town, but also rode out to the next town over, just to see what they had to offer as well.  We didn’t buy chocolate at the other town (whose name I can’t recall) but we did get waffles with whipped cream on them!  The highlight of the bike ride was a couple of duck families swimming along right next to the bike path with tiny ducklings showboating their swimming skills so close to us that we could almost touch them.  We took a boat cruise along the canals in town, laughing at the jokes of the poor guide who had to repeat everything in four languages, seemingly at once.  We climbed the enormous bell tower both for city views and to watch the famous bell show that is supposed to happen every fifteen minutes.  We waited for half an hour and the bells never rang.  We picked a bad time, I guess.  But the views were magnificent.  We checked out breweries and nunneries, cathedrals and museums, both historical and artsy, and even did a quick tour of all four of the local windmills.  We ate, drank and played “Blokus” at a pub that was supposedly four hundred years old.  I’m pretty sure the “Blokus” board game was a bit less than the full four hundred years old, but by the looks of it, not much.  In fact almost everything in the town was historically old and quaint, except the chocolate.  That was fresh.  So much chocolate!  I wish I could convey exactly what made this particular town stand out for me among the dozens of other cute little European towns that we’ve visited.  I can’t put my finger on what makes it better.  The cobblestones were just a little bit cobblier.  The church steeples were just a little bit steeplier.  The place just plain had style.  Bruges kicks butt.

Bruges

The whole town looked like this.

Bruges art.  These two are part of a "make your own caption" contest.

The drive from Bruges to Paris was rainy and fraught with traffic.  We stopped in Lille, as it was touted highly by somebody somewhere, though I can’t remember who or when.  It was a disappointment, although I did have a pretty good birthday lunch of mussels in garlic wine sauce.  Carol was less lucky, because she got brave and chose this sausage-type organ meat thing that was so nasty the pigeons wouldn’t eat it.  We should never have stopped in Lille, because the traffic getting out slowed us down considerably.  We were an hour late getting into Paris.  This wouldn’t have been a big deal except that this was where we were finally saying goodbye to our trusty Renault Clio and our esteemed navigator Marge.  We’d driven over 9000 kilometers in just a couple of months and it was bittersweet to say goodbye.  But it was time to cut the cord.  The office was expecting us at 4:00 and was closing at 5:00.  We were averaging about five km/hr in the city traffic for the last hour of the drive and were starting to worry that we wouldn’t make it by 5:00. 

Goodbye to our Clio after 9000 km of cramming all the luggage into that itty-bitty trunk.

Then things got ugly.  We turned into a gas station where the office was supposedly located.  We got stuck behind a truck that wasn’t going to move any time soon, and then, with little choice left to us, we drove what seemed to be the wrong way into a narrow garage with no means of turning around (walls on either side of us).  To make a long, not so exciting story short, we eventually did get turned around after continuing further into the garage, receiving deadly piercing glares from Parisian workers therein, and drove out and around the block only to find that we were in the right place all along and had we continued for another twenty feet or so, we would have found the office.  The whole crazy fiasco lost us another ten or fifteen minutes and we were lucky to find the office still open and an agent waiting for us.  We gave up the car, which was leased, not rented, and after one signature we were sent marching towards the metro.  That seemed almost too easy.  No inspection of the vehicle.  No haggling over deposits (I didn’t even realize that we’d made one two months prior, but I was now holding money in my hand saying that we had.)  I still worry that when we get back to the states there will be some message in our mailbox stating that there was a problem with the whole lease thing and that we’ll have to convince Renault that we don’t still have the car or something.

Our new means of transportation.

Neither the metro in Paris nor the Underground in London is at all convenient when traveling with luggage.  The number of steps up and down and around and through the stations is staggering when you have heavy baggage in tow.  But somehow we managed to make it to our little apartment along the Seine and had just enough energy to grab a quick bite and go to bed.  Paris could wait until tomorrow.  We were officially beat.

My eyes are open, really.  I'm just looking at the Eiffel Tower.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Now I know everyone is curious as to what we actually saw in Paris.  Everyone knows the landmarks.  Many really need no description at all.  Rather than wax poetic, I’ll think I’ll just kill the sites in a quick list.  There won’t be any real juicy stories in this list.  It is more for me to remember things twenty years down the road.  If I were you, I’d skim through it to the end of day six.  But if you really are curious, then by all means, read every word…

Day 1: We went to Rue Cler (a famous food market street) and made a picnic which we ate in the park directly under the Eiffel Tower.  Then we took the Metro to the opening of the Catacombs.  We hiked the mile or so beneath the city, making friends with the hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of skeletons buried there.  The bones and skulls were stacked efficiently in patterns that made it feel more like a giant Lego park where all the blocks were people parts than it did a burial site.  Weird. We also walked around the immediate neighborhood of our apartment, which was a block away from the Seine. We found the Jewish district and ate at “The Best Falafel Place in the World.”  Our opinion of the place wasn’t quite as good as their own, but it was pretty darned good. 

Not a bad place for a picnic.

That black line on the ceiling above the sign that reads "This here is the empire of the dead," is there so you can find your way out of the maze that goes on for miles under the city.  No flash allowed amongst the bones.  You might wake somebody.

The Hotel de Ville, next door to our apartment, which was just a little bit smaller.

Day 2:  We were staying near the Hotel de Ville (city hall), an incredible edifice.  But the neighborhood was gay-land central.  It was quite amusing.  Posters were up all over the neighborhood advertising male escort services and live shows and such.  The kids were oblivious, but I couldn’t stop chuckling at each corner.  We got breakfast at Legay Chocolate, which is just what it sounds like.  The bakery had items all over shaped exactly like the male anatomy (just the essential male parts).  These items decorated the shop in all of their many different flavors and colors.  I was too chicken to buy any.  But I should have, because I hadn't brought my camera either.  But the chocolate croissants were delectable.  Next we checked out the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde and the nearby Musee de l’Orangerie where eight enormous (maybe 40 feet long each) Monet water lily paintings are on display.  There was more to the museum than that, but we breezed through the rest in about a half an hour.  Then we walked down the Champs-Elysees and people watched.  Of course on the way we partook of the crepe stands and the sweet shops.  We tasted our first macarons (tiny little hamburger shaped pastries with dozens of different color and flavor varieties and colors).  By the end of our week in Paris, we’d each eaten at least a dozen of those suckers.  The walk ended at the Arc de Triomph, which we climbed to the top of to get our first bird’s eye view of the city.  It was 360 degrees of awesome.

The obelisk and the Rodin outside the Musee de l'Orangerie

Triomph!

Day 3:  Father’s Day!  We walked through the Jardin Des Tuleries outside the Louvre on our way to the Musee d’Orsay.  We spent a lot of time in there.  The architecture of the place was incredible.  It was a refit old train station from the nineteenth century.  The art collection on the inside was equally impressive.  So many masters in so little space, compared to the Louvre.  I highly recommend it for your next trip to the city of love.  We ate lunch in an outdoor café in the Jardin Des Tuleries, amongst the marble statues.  Then we metro’d on over to the Eiffel Tower and this time, we actually went to the top.  We thought we were high up when at the Arc de Triomph.  Looking down on it from the top of the Eiffel Tower changed that perspective a bit.  It was so high, I actually got a bit queasy looking down from up there, even standing away from the edge.  Then we went out for pizza and walked along the Seine, listening to the talented street performers play their music.  I even bought a CD from one of them (of course he was from Barcelona, and just performing outside Notre Dame).  Finally we took an evening river cruise to see the city all lit up.  The cruise started at 10:00 and ended at 11:00.  There was still sunlight when we disembarked, it being nearly the longest day of the year.  So there was not too much to see in terms of city lights, though the Eiffel Tower was light up in the colors of the South African flag.  We never did find out why.

Yeah, the Arc seems a little smaller from atop the Eiffel Tower.  The nappers below the tower remind of that movie we all saw in science class in high school, "Powers of Ten."

Inside the Musee d'Orsay

A photo of the Seine from a bridge, well after our river cruise had ended.  The tower at dusk.

Day 4:  We tackled the Louvre.  We ran through about a third of the museum, catching as many highlights as we could.  We loved Napolean’s apartments.  I still say the “Mona Lisa” is highly over-rated, but we battled the crowds to see her too.  The Egyptian stuff was pretty sweet.  The ancient Greece stuff was cool too, especially the “Venus de Milo.”  Carol’s favorite was the “Winged Nike of Samothrace.” But all in all, none of us really enjoyed the Louvre all that much.  It is simply too vast and too crowded to really be able to take much in.  But we felt we had to go.  The kids crashed at home the rest of the day.  Carol and I went to the Pantheon, mostly so I could see Foucault’s pendulum, being the Physics geek that I am.  But it had been taken down as they were doing repairs to the building.  At least I got to see the crypts of some famous Frenchies like Voltaire, Rousseau, Descarte, and my personal favorites, Marie and Pierre Curie.   Then we sat in an outdoor café in the rain and ate another crepe.  Finally we walked through the Luxembourg Gardens (still, in the rain!) which we didn’t even know existed, but after happening across them, we decided that they were the best gardens in downtown Paris.  Further reading enlightened us to the fact that Rick Steves agrees with us on this count.  Go figure.

This is how the art feels about the crowds in the Louvre.  These were just some random shots of the ceiling.

Day 5: We walked the Left Bank and did a whole lot of window shopping.  We did go in one shop, which was a two-story affair, where the top story was jam-packed with taxidermy animals of all sorts.  Rhinos and giraffes and bears and such were often over 20,000 quid a pop.  But they were cool to look at.  The kids liked the bunnies.  Carol liked the crustaceans.  I liked the ostrich.  Then we finally visited Notre Dame even though it had been waiting patiently on our front door step the whole time.  It is still my favorite finished cathedral in all of Europe.  If La Sagrada Familia ever gets completed, I’ll probably have a new winner.  But I’m not holding my breath for that.  Carol and I left the kids at home with some ham and cheese crepes and we had dinner outside a sweet little café on the Ile d’ St. Louis.  We finally got our romance on while alternately gazing into each other’s eyes and into the Seine.

No church does gargoyles like Notre Dame.  The windows aren't too shabby either. 

Day 6:  We took the train out to Versailles.  We didn’t actually go into the palace.  We’d seen enough royal palaces.  We just wanted to see the gardens.  They were mostly a big disappointment.  So much of the place was roped off and inaccessible.  Much of it looked unkempt.  I remember going to Versailles as a teenager and being totally blown away by the immaculateness of it all.  Not this time.  We actually rented a little golf cart and tootled around for an hour just to be able to see more of it without wearing out the souls our shoes.  But in the end, we were underwhelmed.  Back in Paris, we sampled the most recommended ice cream shop of the city, called Berthillon.  I didn’t see what the hype was all about.  I’d had plenty of gelato in Italy that was just as good.  But we had to try it.  Chloe wouldn’t have let us leave the city if we hadn’t.  Finally, Carol and I toured the artist colony of Montmartre, including the Sacre Coeur cathedral and the Moulin Rouge theatre.  We didn’t go see the can-can dancers though.  It was like $200 a ticket or something.  No legs are worth that kind of dough.  We saw Picasso’s studio and Van Gogh’s apartment.  We saw Toulose-Latrec’s pad and Dali’s hangout.  Good stuff.  If I had to live in Paris, I’d definitely choose Montmartre.  It feels less like a crowded city, and more like a place you could relax and let life come to you.  And if it was a beautiful enough place to inspire those guys, then it is good enough for me too.

This shot was of the coolest part of Versailles.  But it was gated off.  No access.  At least the gate was cool.

That was it.  Our time in Paris had come to a close.  We felt that we packed in a good amount of stuff, but didn’t overdo it to the point of exhaustion.  The best parts were the non-touristy things, like playing ping pong in the park with some guys from Iceland or sitting on a bench waiting for our falafel and watching the Hasidic Jews get in their last few games of hacky-sac before running off to prepare for the Sabbath at sunset.  Carol and I never once experienced the rude Parisian that everybody warned us about.  We found the locals to be friendly and helpful in all things.  I’m sure our use of “s’il-vous-plait” and “merci” went a long way.  But really, we found absolutely no basis behind the whole cranky Parisian stereotype.

We boarded the Eurostar train to London alongside Martina Navratilova, which brought me to the realization that Wimbledon would be going on during our stay in London.  Martina had no tickets to share with us however, and I was to quickly learn that no tickets were to be had, unless I had about a thousand pounds a pop.  Oh well, easy come, easy go.  The train trip was pretty easy, it was quick, and it was uneventful.  All of the transfers in the London Underground and the final walk out of the station and up seventy steps with all of the suitcases in tow was not easy.  When we finally got to the house, which was much farther from the center of London than we’d hoped, we were beat.  But the house was perfect, and the location didn’t turn out to be too bad, so all was good.  After all, we were in London!

Parliament, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, looking north along London Bridge and across the Thames.

For us, London was much less about seeing the sights as we did in Paris, and much more about experiencing the culture.  We wanted pubs and theatre and parks and shops and such.  We started our first day off right.  There was a show called “West End Live” happening at Trafalgar Square where five to ten minute snippets of virtually every London live production was being put on by the casts for the public for free.  We stayed for three or four hours.  We feel like we caught twenty shows all in one.  It was awesome.  The casts were all decked out in their costumes and there were thousands of people dancing and singing along like it was a giant party.  We got just enough of  “Thriller” and “We Will Rock You” and “Jersey Boys” and “Chorus Line” and “The Bodyguard” and other song and dance type shows to feel like we really saw each and every one of them.  Super cool.  There were also traditional musicals and dramas and comedies where we obviously only got a taste, but we were hooked.  Just enough to walk up to the counter and purchase discount tickets on whatever we could find.  What we found was tickets to “Stomp” for the next day.  

They weren't front row seats (there were no seats) but at least we had a wall to lean on for the four hours that we stayed.

Then we walked a couple of blocks and found the theatre where “Spamalot” was playing and bought more tickets on the spot for a show that started in ten minutes.  Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail” came to life for us.  The kids were MP virgins and watching that story through their eyes made it all new for me too.  We all came out singing the tunes and quoting the show.  Brilliant!

No pictures in the theatre.  But my refreshments in the bar were photo-worthy.

Stomp was a total blast as well.  The talent those drummers have is astounding.  What gets me is that the cast must lose five pounds a piece during each performance, and they have ten performances a week!  The sheer quantities of absolute positive energy in that theatre was exhausting even for the audience.  A couple of days later, we caught one last show, “Billy Elliot”, a musical about boy growing up in a dying coal miner’s town who only wanted to become a ballet dancer.  It wasn’t my “cup o’ tea” but the girls loved it.  I was hoping at least for one or two catchy tunes, but came away wanting.  Oh well, three out of four ain’t a bad week by any standards.

“So did you do anything besides West End theatre?” you ask.  Well yes.  Here are the highlights:  We toured the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels.  We walked Tower Bridge and did Borough’s Market.  We toured the National Gallery (well, at least the highlights) and the Churchill War Rooms plus Churchill Museum (a personal highlight of the trip).  We did the British Museum (at whirlwind speed).  We did a fly-by at the London Eye, at Big Ben and at Westminster Abbey, choosing to go inside none of the three, preferring instead to be entertained by the street performers and the nut vendors and the phone booths and the double-decker buses (yes, we did ride one of those).  We went to multiple pubs, sampling as much pub food as we could stomach.  Carol and I even went to a movie theatre.  The movie (Superman) was awful and it, in combination with the enormous amounts of British candy that I consumed, made me horribly sick to my stomach, but the cinema experience was worth it.  The theatre just felt so much different than an American one.  The seats were assigned and were much cushier than the ones back home.  I don’t know how else to explain the difference, but it was palpable.

Tower of London Beef-eater.

Tower Bridge.

That's Josh at the top of the definitely non-regulation play structure with the London Eye in the background.  It is amazing how much more fun playgrounds are in Europe, as long as you can get past the lack of safety regulation shenanigans.

The Churchill museum was fantastic.  I could have stayed for days down there in the bunker war rooms reading about this man's legacy.  Definitely a stud.

Mummified cats at the British Museum.

Probably the best few hours we spent in London were with our now old friends, CJ and Jimbo, who we’d first met on the elephant experience in Thailand.  They were excellent hosts, showing us some of their favorite digs.  We rode rented bikes along “The Mall”, watched “The Changing of the Guard”, and took in Hyde Park and Notting Hill with them.  One funny little story is that Jimbo was dumbfounded by the crowds watching the "Changing of the Guard". We just happened upon it in progress. We had no plans to watch, we were just in the right place at the right time. He didn't understand what all the fuss was about.  In fact, he couldn't believe it was a "thing" that tourists did.  He has lived within ten miles of the place nearly his whole life, and has never actually watched it. He didn't even know he was missing out. It is all about perspective I guess. 

We had lunch and tea together and talked like we’d known each other for years.  We are so smitten with them that we’ve invited them to move to California and live with us.  Well, no, we didn’t do that.  That would be weird.  But we did at least insist they make their next “holiday” a trip to California so that we can return the favor.  My plan is to pester them on Facebook until they relent and agree to come.

CJ, Jimbo, the family, and two random strangers that Carol felt picture worthy.

Those tourists in the background probably stood there for hours to get a good spot to see this.  We just happened upon it along the way on our bike ride.  I always thought the "changing" meant they were just getting new knickers!  :)

A large part of the London experience is riding the Underground everywhere.  We must have spent five or six hours on it in total.  Bart back home is such a sad little system in comparison.  There are hundreds of stations, and trains are never more than five minutes away.  And how could you not enjoy a ride on the Picadilly line to Cockfosters?  I mean, seriously!  I can’t even type that without grinning ear to ear, which brings me to the topic of the English language in general.  I so wish I were British.  How they can talk the way they do without constantly falling all over themselves with the giggles is just beyond me.  The names they have for things are hilarious.  The common phrases are just awesome.  “Bangers and mash.  Bubble and squeak.  How ‘bout a cuppa?  Jolly good, wha’?  Brilliant, in’t it?  C’mon, let’s have a go, shall we?”  I can’t get enough.

I don't think that's how the seats were designed to be used, but who am I to judge.

Chillin' with Paddington Bear at Paddington Station on our way out of town.

But we had to leave London behind eventually.  And so we hopped a train to Cornwall and started our two week quest to find out what the rest of England’s got, that London hasn’t.  I’ll let you know in the next post.  For now, that’s all I’ve got.  Cheerio and all that!