Volume 2, Day 52
My three roommates were up and packing at the crack of dawn leaving me with a room to myself to sleep in, if I so desired. There was no compelling reason to get up because the hostel didn’t have any common spaces to hang out or a tea kettle that I could use to make coffee. So, I just lounged in bed with my laptop.
The sky was gray and the weather report predicted a bit of rain in the morning and again in the evening. I eventually got myself out of bed to go wander around Bruges a bit and see the city in the daytime. By my research, I was on the fence about whether it would be worth getting a city pass and trying to cram all the museums and historic buildings into a day. My outdated travel book said the pass was cheaper than the main art museum and the bell tower, so I went to have a look at the museum.
It turns out Bruges has a case of tourism inflation with prices double those quoted in my guidebook. While I wouldn’t have minded paying 15 euros or so to see a dozen sites, the city pass was a whopping 28 euros with the Belfort and museum costing 12 euros a piece (12 euros to climb some stairs or see a handful of paintings). Insanity. Or, I guess I got a bit spoiled by London.
Abandoning the idea of doing any real sightseeing, I continued to stroll through the town keeping my eyes open for a cheap restaurant to eat in at some point and pricing supermarkets. I had the notion of making a picnic and watching the concert again in the evening.
I stumbled across a market on the west side of town and discovered a competitive industry of roasted chickens. Columns of chickens on rotisserie spits rotate high up in the air. After a quick stop at a coffee cart and a bakery cart to have my breakfast, I went to buy a chicken because I simply couldn’t pass up the offer. I carried my 1.2 kg chicken (!) and bag of roasted baby potatoes over to a yard in front of a church and sat down for a impromptu picnic lunch. I could barely finish half the chicken.
I headed back to the hostel afterwards to wash up and take a nap. It was drizzling when I decided to head out again in the afternoon. It seemed to be pretty light, but as soon as I was in the streets the rain steadily grew in size. It was still a bit warm so I was without a rain jacket and I had abandoned my broken umbrella after Japan. I took refuge in a church which was no longer a church. The entrance way was full of a series of rainbow colored curtains with single words written on them. There was a giant swing hanging from the ceiling and a large pit where people threw paper airplanes. In one corner, there was a self-service cafe with a proper coffee machine. I helped myself and plopped a coin in the jar.
I sat for a while in this unique cafe and began to properly brainstorm some of the ideas that have been percolating in my head the past couple of weeks. I’m a bit frustrated with the language learning experiment because I can clearly see the inefficiencies in my methodology, but I lack the tools to learn better. This means I need to build my own system from scratch, and given my expertise and data in Chinese, I should design the system for that language.
The rain didn’t look like it would ever let up, but I needed to use the restroom so I made my way back to the hostel. It was pretty nice that I had a room to myself, so after getting out of my wet clothes, I settled back into bed and put a movie on. Since it didn’t seem like I would get to see much of Bruges in real life, I decided to rewatch “In Bruges.” It was brilliant and I would seriously suggest anyone just watch the movie and skip the city. All the sites are there in the film and presented much more artistically and with fewer tourists than the “real” experience.
It was nearly 6pm and the rain was still steadily filling the air with threads of damp. I had maybe an hour before the shops would close, which presents an interesting question. What is better: Belgium where the shops are open every day but close at 7pm or Germany where the shops are closed on Sundays but normally stay open until 9 or 10 pm? Ever the optimist, I made a beeline for a more distant (but better stocked) Carrefour Express with the leftover chicken and picnic blanket in tow. I was pretty wet by the time I made it to the market where I picked up a salad and a couple bottles of refrigerated local beer.
Since it was out of the question to enjoy my meal al fresco, I went back to the hostel, squeezing my way through the packed downstairs bar to the back stairs to go upstairs. I didn’t relish the idea of eating in the room (call it a principle of mine), but luckily I still had the place to myself so I guess I could get away with it under the special circumstances. I sat on the unsafe window ledge watching a couple of Youtube videos during my meal, and after finishing my third and final beer, went and laid back down on bed with another movie.
Not long after the movie finished and when I was both congratulating myself on my good luck while thinking about going to sleep, two roommates showed up in the room. An Italian guy and a Turkish girl had had a rough couple of days, traveling without plans or arrangements and getting completely soaked in Brussels. They were very talkative and convinced me to go out with them for one beer–“the best beer in Belgium.”
It was a bit of an adventure, trying to find an open cafe at 11pm. The bars were still going strong, but that wasn’t what we were looking for. We also had to stop to take lots of photos and go track down Belgian fries first, but we had one beer at a cafe and got back a bit after midnight. There was someone sleeping in the room and I was absolutely perplexed as to how he managed to secretly check in when I had been in the room 80% of the day.
| 2 Pastries @ market | 1.8 |
| Coffee @ market | 1.2 |
| Chicken and potatoes | 12.58 |
| Coffee @ “Magda Cafe” | 2 |
| Salad and 3 beers | 10.28 |
| Beer @ cafe | 5 |
| Total: | 32.86 EUR (256.3 RMB) (USD 37.22) |
Running Total: 19304.8 RMB (USD 2803.44)
Daily Average: 371.2 RMB (USD 53.91)