Brugge

After one and a half days in Gent we decided to also visit Brugge. So we drove there early morning arriving just before 11AM. Weather was a bit grey but excellent for walking around.
Brugge has fantastic underground parking right near the centre. Super easy to find and from there you walk straight to the Belfort, which is the tower of power behind us.

Gent looked nice but Brugge is a fair bit prettier I find. The buildings also look better cared for.

Lots of water here as well.

Little streets between old buildings.

Apparently Brugge's first inhabitant was this bear, believe it or not. Check the story here: http://www.trabel.com/brugge/bruges-history.htm.

After walking around the centre we started walking towards the old beguinage. The walk there was lovely and went through little streets, gardens and courtyards.

Yours truly posing in chocolate street numero uno. The number of choclate shops here was nuts. At some point every second shop was a chocolate shop!
We also sat down in a tea room here and had a very nice coffee with... chocolates which we were unable to finish...

Chocolates everywhere...

Arriving at the beguinage.

Inside it was wonderfull and quiet. A mini forrest of tall trees grew in the middle. It looked kinda unreal.

Looking accross through the trees.

In the chapel nuns were ehm, chanting? Singing? There were few and they were all old. Living history. Soon religion will be a thing of the past and it will just be history...

Outside of the beguinage. This was as far as we walked out of the centre. My camera's battery ran empty and we walked back to the car, hit the road and went home.

It was a lovely weekend together with Simone.

Gravensteen castle and more

After breakfast today, we first went back to the graffiti ally across the street. I loved the colours there!

But the real reason we went there was to locate a geo-cache that Simone found on her geo-cache app on her phone. After looking around for a while I found the cache stuck against the inside of metal bars with magnets :-)

We then walked towards the castle "Gravensteen" which we wanted to visit. Its entrance is at the square where we had dinner last night.

The castle was really fun to visit. It's not to big, lots of things and ways to photograph the castle itself or your lovely girlfriend ;-)

Great views though the entire city is crawling with cranes from all the construction that's being done everywhere...

We made it to the top!

Windows...

More windows ;-)

Me.

Simone sitting in front of the donjon.

I can really recommend a visit to the castle. It's under construction here and there but they've done most of it now. There are also some medieval attributes on display such as swords, guns and torture devices.

When we left the castle, another geo-cache was located nearby. The pointer was kind of in the middle of the square, yeah right. Thankfully a clue pointed out a tiny ally which we found. "You need a tall person to find this cache" was another hint.

The cache was hidden in a hole high in the wall inside the ally. Second cache today! :-)

The weather was OK again. Perfect for walking around and enjoying all the pretty houses and bridges.

Lovely.

Houses along one of the main canals. A big display of wealth.

We walked out of the centre a bit to find a third cache and later a fourth one.

What a pretty little face :-)

Then we walked back in town again, spotting the odd statue here and there.

Dinner in the evening wasn't great unfortunately. Service was slow and distant. When we left it was pouring down with rain so we had desert at the hotel. We were both very tired from walking all day long.

Another great day!

Gent and Brugge, day 1

Today Simone and I drove to Belgium for the weekend. I had booked us 2 nights in a hotel in Gent, where we would spent at least the first 2 days. On the way there we did a bit of bunny hopping with a Ferrari.

A car that can go very fast but (sadly) has to stick to speed limits of 100km/h... Lovely car nevertheless!

Checking in was easy and we even managed to park the car in the underground hotel parking. After ditching our gear in the hotelroom we set out and walked in to town.

Gent is a very old city and its centre was build in times of great wealth.

After the tiring drive (we had incredible amounts of rain) we had our first rest in the sun. Naturally I had to have some Belgian brew!

And a waffle!

Against all odds the sun came out and made us a beautiful afternoon.

Gent has a few wonderful canals. Some with houses standing in the water. Gent likes to call itself the "Venice of the North" but we all know that Amsterdam is the only real Venice of the North now, do we? ;-)

At the end of the afternoon we went back to our hotel room for a little rest and to freshen up a bit. This was the view to the right.

And the view straight ahead. Not bad!

We walked back in to town at dusk to find us a lovely restaurant where we had a wonderful dinner.

It was a lovely afternoon and evening!

Budapest day 1

The courtyard of our apartment building. On the morning of the very first day Eva and I managed to lock ourselves out while looking around from the balcony. The draft shut the front door on us. PANIC! Thank god the window was fucked and Eva managed to squeeze her hand through and open the door from the inside....

And then we started exploring Budapest. Those people love to put coloured tiles on the roofs of their buildings. Nice! This is a train station.

The Danube. The water was brown instead of blue. But it was also 2-3 metres lower than a few weeks ago so that was great!

Look, I'm smiling ;-) You can click this photo for a bigger version and my smile will be bigger!

They got trams there, too.

And mojitos.

And sun. Lots of it!

Eva doing girly-shopping.

Eva with 2 big dogs.

Impressive building.

Nice hungarian beer.