We did so many little things today I am not even going to attempt to write about each one. The reader can go to Trip Advisor if interested in more detail :) I am going to treat this instead as a photo diary, with a simple list, maybe some description, and photos to support. Dan sent me 72 pics to consider out of the 100+ he started with. I am including 25 here.

I will start with a brief history for context. Bruges was a major center for finance, trade and art in its prime, during the centuries between 1200-1500. It fell out of favor when it didn’t keep up with mercantile progress, and lost its shipping capabilities when the canal to the North Sea silted. Antwerp became a bigger economic center after that, and remains so today (especially in diamonds). Bruges was considered a dead city by 1850, but tourists became interested later that century. For much of the next hundred years it focused on building tourism and restoring its medieval roots. This paid off big when UNESCO (covered yesterday) added it to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2000. It now gets about 2 million visitors a year.

The purpose of most of the attractions is to give the visitor a sense of the city’s history, a sense of what it was like to live there 600 years ago, enjoy really beautiful things, and various combinations of those objectives.

All that said, here’s what we did today:

Church of our Lady

This guy did the demo in 3 languages: English, Dutch, French. It was pretty impressive. He had a slight cough and would even say “excuse me” in whatever language he was speaking at the time when he coughed! He easily switched to whatever language the audience used during the Q&A session.

Salvador Dali exhibit was last. Here are a couple of Dan’s favorites from there.