Brugges

Today we took a walking tour with Emil (not the yellow group, red group??). He was a young man about 30 and a schoolteacher at the secondary level. in Bruges and even pointed out his mother’s house on our tour he was very personable and gave a lot of history at several stops. I especially enjoyed hearing his stories of his grandmother and her cooking. I think my favorite was the Beginage. This is a sanctuary sanctuary for single women to live. It began in blank when women were accosted by men and wanted to live a more peaceful life is like a monastery. The women dedicate their lives to God, but are not nuns. It is a walled off community and the gates open at six in the morning and close at six at night. It was like a little oasis in the middle of bustling Brugges. The building had its own chapel, a garden so that they could be self sustaining. There is also evidence of a pigeon coop for male delivery. Some have said that this could have been almost like the beginning of feminism. In any case. It seemed like a very peaceful place to live. he told us much of the history of Bruges, but the one story I remember it was the love story of a Belgian princess from long ago. Her first two husbands had died when she was just a teenager her father wanted her to marry a wealthy man as it turns out she met a German man, but her father did not approve, the young couple to Rome to see the pope to get married, but the pope refused to marry them because he knew the fathers disapproval. they ran off and went to another city to live for about five years. They went out hunting in the woods when a bear started to attack the young princess. Her lover drove a knife through the bear and pin him to a tree. The story got back to the father and the father finally led saying you took my daughter away but now you have saved her and I accept you as her husband. Now, on many of the seals around Bruges, you will see a bear and on the courthouse in the large market you can find a statue of the young man holding his arm after his attack on the bear. The courthouse is filled with many many statues of people, and apparently they were once colored, they now appear white, but they have much detail and are very interesting. At 4 o’clock we went to our waffles and beer workshop. It sounds very strange, but it was really a fun activity. we were grouped with three couples from Florida and two men from Hawaii, 10 of us in all. Our teacher was named Piet. We started off with some beer tastings; a cherry beer, a Radler like beer and a peach beer. Scotty liked the second beer (lemony) and I liked the third (peachy). We moved to the cooking station and each couple had tools to make their waffles. He led us step-by-step and as we went along, he gave us two more beers to sample. So altogether, we had at least five glasses of beer, possibly more as he would pour extra every once in a while the ingredients were all laid out and unlike an American recipe, we weighed the amounts as we went along, we cooked the waffles in the waffle maker and began the fun part of eating. The waffles were very very light and we had some choices of toppings - chocolate, Biscoff butter and whipped cream. It was really a fun workshop, we had a fun group of people and I would recommend it.