Brugge, Belgium - DAY ONE & TWO

Ok, so Friday kinda sucked. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Luke and I decided to stay in on our last night in Paris, thinking that that way we would go to bed early and go to bed sober cause we had to get up at 6:00am in order to leave by 7:00am to be at the bus pickup point by 8:00am. BOY WERE WE WRONG. We ended up staying up late playing cards and drinking cheap wine. Before bed I set the alarm and we thought everything was ok. BOY WERE WE WRONG - AGAIN. The little door thingy that holds the battery in the back of the clock was lost somewhere in Poland so the battery ended up falling out sometime during the night. Luke and I woke up to the sun shining and neither of us bothered to get out of bed to see what time the clock said, thinking that we had woken up before the alarm. BOY WERE WE WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I finally got out of bed and realized that the clock was BLANK. WHAT TIME IS IT?! I looked at my watch, (which has no numbers on it) and couldn't figure out if it was 7:00am or 8:00am. (Normally I have no problem telling the time but I was so damn panicked that I couldn't read my own damn watch). We both hopped to it, packed our shit and hoped it was 7:00am. We figured that we could zoom over to the pick up point and that we would find out if we had missed the bus when we got there. We were really upset cause it would really *uck with our budget if we had to pay for train tickets to get us to Brugge to meet the next bus to Amsterdam. On our way out Luke stopped to use the bathroom and I ran into the cleaning lady. "Quelle heure est-il?" I asked in my best French accent. "Sept heure" the grumpy woman responded. "Luke, it's 7:00am!!! Get out of the shitter and let's go!" I yelled through the door. We bolted to the metro (Well, we didn't really bolt..... we were pretty hung over and damn tired and were carrying our 50 lb bags so we kinda just slothed around as quickly as possible) and made it to the pick up point at 7:45am. Just in time!
The bus ride was about 4 hours long so Luke and I napped a bit, which helped ease our hangovers so we could start the beer tasting in Belgium as soon as we got off the bus....
Brugges was beautiful. It's a very small city/town in Belgium that has wonderful old buildings and many canals and this lovely big square in the centre of the city. There isn't much to do there as it is so small, but that made it easy to see everything.
Our hostel was great. It has it's own bar with tons of different types of beers, a full kitchen with everything you need, a nice back patio and it was only about a 7 minute walk to the city centre. We lined up with the rest of the Busabout gang to check in, threw our bags into a locker and checked out our room. We were in an 8 bed room. It was a quite small room with 4 bunkbeds jammed into it and a WC outside the door that we shared with 4 other rooms. There was a girl in the room that was touring around on her own so I invited her to join us for mussels and fries which is what we were told by the Busabout people is the traditional thing to eat when in Brugge (Other than chocolate and waffels of course). The three of us found our way to the centre of town and while the girl went to buy some maps and grab a quick waffel, Luke and I found a nice patio, ordered the mussels, a salad with bacon and two of the restaurants own beers on tap. The beer arrived and was FANTASTIC. The best beer we'd ever tasted! The mussels arrived and they were fabulous. A HUGE pot full of them. (We were thanking God that we only ordered one bucket to share). My salad arrived and it was DISGUSTING. It was basically a pile of fatty, weird bacon on a few pieces of lettuce and half a tomato. It should have been called BACON with SALAD, not the other way around. Needless to say, Luke ate the bacon for me. (He was DYING for meat since we hadn't had any since we left Poland). The girl (Whose name escapes me right now) returned to meet us, shared the mussels and had a beer. Very interesting girl. Grew up in Zimbabwe and moved to England about a year and a half ago to be a teacher. We all went and did some sightseeing after the meal (We each paid 5 Euros to climb something like 300 stairs to the top of the clock tower), Luke tried a waffel, and then Luke and I broke off from her to find an internet cafe where I typed my shpiel about Paris. After that Luke and I went back to the hostel to finish our baguette and cheese, went to the town square area to watch a live band (They sucked so we bailed) and then found ourselves watching some guy from New York get himself out of a straight jacket and large chains. At about 10:00pm or so we headed back to the hostel to have a few beers at the bar and play some cards. They have this deal there where you can purchase a ticket (It's actually a coaster stamped with numbers one through 5) that gets you five beers that they choose and are served from the least strong (5%) to the strongest (8.5%). Then it was bed time. It was very interesting sleeping in a bunkbed in a room full of strangers but turned out to be MUCH better than we thought it would be.
Saturday we woke up and headed out for breakfast. We managed to find somewhere with fried eggs, bacon and a croissant and then wandered around the rest of the town. We found a great market with cheap clothes and items (I bought a scarf) and then we hit the fresh fruit market for the best raspberries and blackberries we have ever had. They were HUGE and tasted fantastic - and I thought I like berries before - boy, I had NO IDEA they could taste that good. We then wandered to a chocolatier where we splurged and bought some truffles. AMAZING. By this time it was about 2:00pm so we went to the local supermarket and bought ourselves a chicken breast, some veggies and some sauce. We were going to have a REAL meal. Luke took a nap at this point and I read a book on the back patio. Very relaxing. After the hustle and bustle of Paris, it was really nice to just sit and do nothing. Once Luke woke up we finished off the beer ticket and played cards with a couple of people that were sitting outside with us. Nice people. A couple of kids but fun nonetheless. They had some very amusing and very interesting travel stories that they shared with us. The boy (He was 20) was quite the stoner and pretty much kept all of laughing the whole time. Luke made a great stir fry (Just like home!) and we sat outside to eat it. More drinking happened after that with a couple from Montreal who were fantastic and hilarious. We planned to see a concert that was on that night but we got so engrossed in conversation and trying all of the beers that we lost track of time and missed. The couple went to bed around 1:00am so Luke and I moved inside where we met a couple of young girls from Alberta and continued to party until about 3:00am.
We slept in until 10:00am on Sunday (Just in time for checkout) and hung around in the bar drinking coffee with the 2 Canadian girls (Who are also on a Busabout trip) from the night before. (It was raining and we were dead tired).
The bus came at 1:00pm and we were off to Amsterdam!