Bruges: Day 2

Well folks, this is it. We have just completed our final day in Europe. It doesn't even feel real, but it has been such an incredible experience.

Our last day in Bruges was, of course, wonderful. It rained quite a bit this morning, but by the afternoon, everything had cleared up, so that worked out quite nicely. We spent the morning wandering the streets and shopping. (I forgot to put this on yesterday's blog, but Greg actually wanted to go shop for clothes for himself. AND he bought a few things! Crazy!) When the rain got really bad, we stepped inside a cathedral called the Church of Our Lady and saw this beautiful sculpture by Michelangelo:

After that, we climbed the 366 steps (in 9 minutes) to the top of the bell tower to see this spectacular view of the city:

and also this one:

Adorable, no?

After our climb, we went to get some lunch...more waffles! These were especially delicious and picture worthy:

We maybe had waffles for lunch and then more waffles for dessert. Come on though, it's Belgium! We had to.

After lunch, we took a little boat tour through the canals and saw tons of cute stuff like this:

And this house appears in the Audrey Hepburn film "A Nun Story" which I have never seen, but now plan on watching:

After the boat tour, we went to the Chocolate Museum to learn all about the origin of chocolate and why Belgium is so famous for it. We also got to watch a chocolate-making demo and try some samples. They were delicious. This was Greg's favorite part:

The rest of the day we just spent walking around, enjoying the city. We found some beautiful places to sit and walk through:

Bruges has definitely been one of our favorite cities and it was a great way to end our trip...though it's not really over yet. Now we get to go to San Francisco to see one of Greg's best friends get married! Maybe I'll post about that too...we'll see. We're sad that the trip almost over, but excited to be reunited with all our friends and family.

Bruges: Day 1

Well, we are in the final city of our trip. Number 16 of 16. It's crazy and it doesn't feel real at all. It's pretty bittersweet actually...we're excited to be coming home soon, but we're sure gonna miss being here too.

Bruges is, of course, absolutely incredible. People have been telling us how amazing it is ever since we decided to come, and they are right. We took the train here this morning and got in around 2 pm, after which we immediately got some Belgian waffles for lunch. They were pretty delicious and we're looking forward to having more tomorrow.

After checking into our hotel (which is right on a canal, so our room has a beautiful view of the water), we went out exploring. Everything here is so adorable and picturesque:

After some wandering, we found the Bloed Basilek, which basically means blood basilica. That's because there's a phial of Christ's blood kept in a silver tabernacle inside. Apparently, it was brought back from Jerusalem by the crusaders. While we were inside, a priest had the phial out on display and people lined up to touch it and pray over it. It was actually pretty cool:

After that, we really didn't do much except for walk. Each street was so adorable that Greg kept pulling out the camera to take pictures of its cuteness. Here are a couple good ones:

After all the walking, we had a nice dinner at a cafe. Greg ordered what seems to be the specialty here: mussels and fries. I stuck with chicken.

By the way, there were 56 mussels in there and Greg ate them all. Go him. Tomorrow is our last day here. Crazy.