Euro 2014 - On To Sightseeing - Touring Brugges With 20,000+ Of My Best Friends

Brugges is the really famous sibling to Ghent.  Both have similar histories but the old town in Brugges has been much better kept closer to its original state and is a much larger area.  As a result Brugges is the bigger deal from a tourist perspective.  Brugges is on all the bus tours and is just miles from the sea so is on the cruise ship itineraries as well.  Add into this mix that the day we went, May 1, was a national holiday and the result was the place was mobbed.

I'm afraid I really dislike...no REALLY DISLIKE...dealing with hoards of humanity.  And I don't like places that are almost exclusively focused on tourists.  Ghent was more a real city in my opinion.  You could walk a couple of blocks and you were in the middle of the hustle and bustle of daily living.  I like that a lot more.  So I was off to a very unhappy start to this day.  On top of this it was much warmer than expected and I was hot plus I was doing the full camera Sherpa routine for the second day in a row and my shoulders were pretty tired.  So I'm afraid that I didn't have a very positive attitude toward it.  So I apologize if my photo journalism of this is not up to my usual standards.

One nice thing was a surprise that I arranged for Wife.  We are meeting up with our friends Barry and Melissa who live in Albuquerque and San Miguel Allende, Mexico when we get to France.  But when we were comparing schedules, a couple of months or so ago, Barry and I noticed we were going to both be in Brugges on the same day.  So we cooked up a plot to get together without our spouses knowing it.  My story was that we had to be at this statue on the main plaza at exactly Noon and have our picture taken because it would be good luck for the year. Barry told Melissa that they had not seen this statue the last time they were in Brugges and it rotated.  Our surprise was complete.  Melissa walked up to the statue staring at the top until she was almost completely on top of me before Barry had her look down.  Wife was out taking pictures so I had Barry walk up to her and ask her for picture taking advice with equal surprise effect.  We went off for lunch and shopping afterwards which was great fun.

Brugges en photo (as we say in French...got to start practicing)

Oops, first a last Ghent shot.  

 This is a picture of how they preserve the facades of buildings when doing new construction

Canals

Towers

Other Buildings