In Bruges.

Well, while there were some serious storms hitting Germany this weekend, we decided to fool the weather and escape to Belgium. Why Belgium? 2 reasons: Beaches there are the closest to the Rhein-Main-Area and we wanted to visit Bruges. Why Bruges? Because it looked so nice in “In Bruges” (or “Brügge sehen und sterben” for my German readers. Yes, I know. Another strange German sentence with too many words anyway!). Don’t be shocked: We didn’t drive there to get some fancy celebrity pictures or to plunge our faces into some weird cardbord cut-outs showing Colin Farrell. Well, might look nicer though. It was the landscape and the pitoresque oldtown of Bruges which attracted us upfront.

Actually, this was the first time Hollywood didn’t disappoint me: Bruges is really nice. A lot of small streets, nice and old buildings, most of them built in the 17th century. Definetely worth a visit. We went to a very nice restaurant in the evening called t’Schrijzverke. Ate good fish there and had plenty of good wine. We stood a night in our hotel (which is ok but looks much nicer on the website than in real life) and moved on to the seaside the day after.

To be honest:  we’ve been to all villages by the sea from Koksijde in the west to Kokke in the north-east. All of them are not nice (don’t want to say ugly).  Really. The beaches are excellent and beautiful. If you want do go sailing or surfing, you’ll find excellent conditions there.  But if you expect nice romantic villages with small restaurants at the beach: Visit another country. The beach is covered with huge hotels (7 floors mostly), appartment houses or casinos. Hard to believe that the government still allows building these houses. There are a lot of construction sites and the area from Koksijde to Oostende doesn’t have any free space on the beach. Oostende… well, I don’t want to talk about this city.

We were searching for a hotel and a nice spot all day long and drove along the cost for almost 70 kilometeres. Finally, we ended up in Knokke. Beautiful beaches but also ugly hotels. However, this small town was nicer than the ones western Oostende. So, we stood here and found a hotel: The hotel was built in 1980 (at least the elevator was telling that on a sign), so the furniture was. But it is clean and not wrecked at all: It looks like the time has stopped ticking since 1980. We enjoyed or time and found a really nice beach bar called “Bar Alain”. This 10 seats bar is in the middle of the beach and offers a small range of beers and wines. Nice service and relaxed ambience. Really enjoyed ourselves dispite the huge hotels in our back.

The next day we drove to Gent, a 240k popolation city. Just like Brugge, this city comes along with a lot of old buildings from the 16th century, a gothic cathedral, a water castle and a lot of small streets and squares. Seems like this city is very creative: There are lots of galleries, boutiques and musicians. We’ll definetely come back as 2 hours were simply not enough to discover this beautiful city.