In Which I Spend All Day on a Train: Croatia to Bosnia

come with meeee and you’ll beeeee in a wooooorld of chocolate shops and bridges

HOT DAMN Bruges is adorabullllll. I finally went to this charming lil baby city in Belgium recently and I gotta say, just based on the human-to-chocolate-shop ratio alone, it’s one of my favorite places. The scenery is pretty great too, and other people would rave about the beer, the food (though not the vegan food – you must do research and know where to go), the beer, the quaint old-timey vibe, the beer, and the delightful ease of a visit. I am mostly enamored of the chocolate. OH and the cone-shaped fruit candy too. See I have more than one interest. At this time of year, the Christmas markets are all over Belgium, and while Bruges’s didn’t have anything of particular interest for me, it was still a pretty sight, not that the town needed any help in that department.

We were supposed to go to Bruges this past summer for the bank holiday weekend, but we had to reschedule because of TINGS, I tell ya, TINGS. Honestly, it was fine that we had one less day to spend. I’m not saying more time wouldn’t be nice here, but having all of Saturday, one night, and then Sunday morning was plenty for seeing the highlights and getting a feel for the town. Also it was suuupes crowded. I think it’s always full of tourists, but now that it’s Christmas-market season, it’s packed. (Doesn’t detract from its loveliness! You got nowhere to go!) We’re usually go-go-go travelers, so I think it worked out that we had less time since this is the opposite of a go-go-go place.

Our first stop once we arrived was, naturally, THE BLOOD OF CHRIST CHURCH. This place is seriously called Procession of the Holy Blood, because apparently the blood of Christ is in a vial and you walk by it one by one with a guard watching. Considering all the vials of blood I’ve seen, this one definitely ranks high and isn’t going to come back telling me I have another auto-immune disorder, so.

There’s actually a line-guard to make sure everyone stays in line orderly and like doesn’t make a fuss, don’t make a fuss, and then there’s a lady standing with the vial at the top of the altar/stage and you say ‘hi’ and ‘thanks I guess’ to her as you look at the ancient glass vial. Since you cannot take photos of the blood of Christ (it’s like a vampire it can’t have its essence captured), I’ll splain: it is a very ancient glass vial covered with gems and crusted over with…well I guess with the holy spirit?

It’s 2.50 euro for the museum inside the blood church, but it’s free to see the blood vial in the church. Not sure what’s in the museum part, probably like information on where the blood came from and all that lore which you will not get from me.

After we saw the blood of Christ, we went to see him as a lil baby with his mama at the Church of Our Lady, or the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk if you nasty. This church/museum houses the famous Michelangelo sculpture Madonna of Bruges, which depicts the Virgin Mary and her magical baby. It’s a lovely sculpture, but the whole alcove it stands in is currently under construction. Thankfully, the museum knew that visitors were coming just for that so there is a hole in the scaffolding so you can still see it.

The best thing is the information on the wall for this piece. It begins “Contrary to the habits early in the sixteenth century, Our Lady does not look tender and sweet here, but rather glum and sad. She thinks deeply and expresses the fear that her large and naked child will soon run away.” LARGE AND NAKED CHILD. I sent this to Rob Delaney obviously, the king of large and naked children.

So that’s the main thing in the Onke museum, but there are other treats that make it worth the ticket price (which I just checked and it was only 4 euro so go nuts). Across from the sculpture, there’s a painting that made us go ‘huh, that looks like a Caravaggio’ (and by ‘us’ I mean ‘husbo’ because I am just like ‘oh art’) and it WAS! And also was not. Facts: This painting, The Disciples at Emmaus, was long attributed to Caravaggio because, as husbo can attest to, it looks like his work. However, experts now believe it’s the work of Hendrik Ter Brugghen in the style of Caravaggio; he liked to copy him. Fun fact we learned, Caravaggio’s first name was Michelangelo too! He must have been pissed!

(Oh dear, upon further investigation it looks like Caravaggio was not his last name but the town he grew up in??? and it’s a ‘da Caravaggio’ situation like ‘da Vinci’ which ISN’T LEONARDO’S LAST NAME it means FROM VINCI and oh my god I really really hope Michelangelo Merisi is okay with everyone referring to him by the name of his town ahhhh.) (Okay upon even further investigation it appears Caravaggio was a murderer? so call him what you want.)

Here’s a scenery interlude for making it through the museum bits.

As you can see, taking little boat rides around the canals is a Big Thing, though no one sings (however, they do use an intense microphone setup that we could hear in our hotel room; luckily they stop tours at night). I decided not to join in the fun though, because I guess I hate fun. No I think I had good reasons: a) it was cold to be stuck in a boat b) I get seasick (okay man it’s not ‘the sea’ but you never know) and c) the best pictures are of the boats on the canals, not from the boats.

How about a quick look at the Christmas market? Just a quick one because it was pretty meh for me. In the main square, there were the familiar wooden stalls of European winter markets with the familiar wares: fried meats and fish and fries, alcohol, more non-vegan food, touristy gifts that put “Bruges” on magnets and towels and shirts and ornaments &c., and more alcohol. It was pretty-ish, but overrun with drunk men who had no idea whose space they were intruding into so we peaced rather quickly.

I mean I’m not going to share pictures of meat stalls (which was all the food, except for the cheese) and bar stalls so there’s really nothing left except woollen socks and ornamenti. The belfry looks great though; maybe we should climb that later.

Here’s the best thing we saw:

Before, between, and after the sights we visited, we bought chocolate. We bought a lot of chocolate, and sadly, even though it has been like a week, I’m out. My favorite shop was La Belgique Gourmande, because the staff was helpful AND they didn’t even have to be – their bowls of various chocolates were really well marked with all allergens!!! Eeee! I love a good labeling system!

The funniest thing was that, by our second day in Belgium, we learned that this is pretty much the most popular chain of chocolate shoppes in the whole damn country and we were treating it like a tiny little artisan find, HILARIOUS. Who cares, I love that they have more of these in Brussels (next post) than Starbucks in NYC. We shopped at three of them.

Below you can see the best chocolate they make that I should have gotten 100 pieces of instead of 100 grams. It’s like Ferrero Rocher with an amazing hazelnut butter filling but there’s no dairy! You can see on the tag their allergen legend, which shows that this contains nuts and soy, and NOO DAIRY! woot! I love them for this guidance! I love labels. Except for people, obvs.

We also bought some-but-not-enough of the famous Belgian fruit candy called cuberdons, which is like little cone-shaped pate de fruits and they are really good! They are also accidentally vegan so go nuts! Although I’d avoid the cherry because it tasted like medicine. We learned that these famous candies are only really found in Belgium because they don’t last long enough to export; the quality would suffer and people would be like ‘these aren’t so great’ instead of like ‘moar pleeeease.’

Alright, time for another sightseeing adventure before we get to the food. On Sunday morning, before we left Bruges for Brussels, we planned to climb the belfry in the main square. It’s one of the city’s most prominent landmarks, and is heavily responsible for the historic centre of Bruges attaining UNESCO world heritage status. The bell tower was built in 1240 but rebuilt after a fire in 1280…which is still super super old. There were several fires over the years, including one that wiped out the spire that was never rebuilt, so the tower today is shorter than it once was.

Here it is at night, GORGE.

And here in the daytime:

Unfortunately, the day we climbed it – the only slot we had available – was foggy mcfoggerton senior. Visibility was like, maybe three inches in front of you. Once you got a foot off the ground NOPE couldn’t see shite. Even the ticket man was like ‘are you sure you want to climb today…’ and we were like ‘no but we have no choice.’ We had to climb the thing, because we climb things (except ice mountains) so it had to be during the fog.

Kind of hilarious! It reminded us of our INCREDIBLE (as in cannot believe it) experience in Huangshan, when we climbed all day up a mountain in China and saw literally nothing. We had fun though; we do like climbing towers, and it’s good exercise (more on that below) (I mean sort of, like 2 words).

Alright, y’all bitches made it. It’s time for the vegan food. So, the food in Belgium is not surprisingly not the greatest for vegans, unless you like living on frites (that means fries), which I do not, because – hot take alert – fries aren’t that great. The HappyCow app is indispensable for Bruges, alerting us to the vegetarian restaurants or at least the veg-friendly ones. We only had two meals in Bruges but we had experiences (run-ins) with a few restaurants.

First, I took advice from HappyCow reviews and went to Brasserie Forestiere restaurant for lunch, a slightly upscale (meaning, expensive (as all of Bruges is) and doesn’t do tap water oof) cafe that promised to know what vegan meant and in fact has a tofu wrap on the menu. It was fine, they definitely do and that’s definitely true, but it was mostly soy sauce and a lot bell peppers, which I don’t like, so if I knew better I would have chosen the falafel place ‘t Brugs Pitahuis (I get the pitahouse part and I guess I can accept Brugs but I do NOT get the ‘t business (I understand that it’s their abbreviation for the word for ‘the’ but still it’s difficult for me)). But then again, I do get falafel all the time since I live next to a Pilpel (best falafel in London alert) so I’m not mad. I’m especially not mad because the pile of peppers came with a side salad AND a scoop of avocado/guacamole (best not to ask), and you know how much I love a surprise salad. And salad in general. Why do I love salad so much? Hot tip: mix the whole avo scoop into the wrap and everything is better.

Anyway, it was decent and incredibly filling, but a wrap it was not. A wrap has LITERALLY one requirement:

And this clearly failed that. I wouldn’t call this cornucopia of onions and peppers spilling out of an open shell a wrap. Of course I did try to pick it up and eat it as intended, which was forking hilarious (it did not work).

If you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll pass the Frites Museum on the walk back from Forestiere to the main square. Yes, it’s an entire museum dedicated to fries. No, we did not go but knock yourself out.

For our one dinner in town, we were eager to try the all-vegetarian restaurant Des Plaats. However, the guy who greeted us was kind of a dick. Fun fact that we did not know: You cannot eat dinner in Bruges without a reservation. And I don’t just mean at this little dick boy’s restaurant; I mean everywhere. We were turned away from several places that were ‘fully booked’ even though they were absolutely empty at the time. Bruges just WILL NOT FEED YOU without a reservation, which okay, I understand, it’s crowded, but we didn’t know. Except instead of just saying ‘no, we’re fully booked sorry’, the Des Plaats bellend was like supes rude, unnecessarily. Fork his boring plaats anyway.

Luckily, one restaurant remained to check out, one I’m not sure why we didn’t go to first since it’s entirely vegan: de Brugsche Tafel, a small family-run restaurant that has a small but solid menu and two adorable kids helping their parents out. I wanted to hug them I was so happy they agreed to feed us. It was great, too, and we were happy to support a family.

We read a lot of good reviews about the ramen, but they had two specials that sounded good: the mushroom palak with basmati rice, and vegetables in vindaloo sauce, so both Indian-esque dishes. To fit super well with that theme, we got bruschetta to start (I’m funny). The bruschetta was on regular sliced bread, which is funny, but toasted, so it all worked out. It was one the garlickiest foods I’ve ever eaten and I FORKING LOVED it. Husbo, who is less garlic-oriented, said it was almost too garlicky, but I, a person with eye-tal blood who has garlic coming through her pores at most times, do not think so.

The mains were great; I think the mushroom palak is the winner but overall everything was, as the Brits say about food which I just do not understand but I guess I have to now, ‘nice.’ A weird thing we both noticed was that they didn’t use any beans, tofu, seitan, &c. Usually we see this lack of protein sources at restaurants that aren’t vegan, especially if they’re trying fancy tasting menus, but not at all vegan places, so that was quite odd.

The best part about de Brugsche Tafel (aside from the hospitality, the ability to feed us without buying into the Bruges Booking Malarkey, the family-helping jawn, and the fact that every once in a while we’d see the tiny little girl child climb CLIMB up onto chairs to remove empty dishes from other tables and it was hilarious and adorable) is that THEY HAVE VEGAN BELGIAN WAFFLES.

Baby’s first vegan Belgian waffle! Granted it’s my first time being back in Belgium since being vegan but still, wowee! I remember when I was first in Brussels, I guess 15 years ago, and I had a street waffle with maybe speculoos? and it was great obvs but this was EXCELLENT. The waffle part was so amazing it didn’t even need the chocolate sauce (but I wanted it). They are 4 euro and this little carton was the to-go container but whatever I ate it as soon as we got outside and it was magical.

As for our lodging, that was a bit of a predicament. Very, very few hotels in Bruges will let you book for just one night. The place we were going to stay in in August was going to be for two nights, so they wouldn’t let us change it to one. (Well, then they said ‘for you, we will make an exception!’ and offered a one-night rate…at the price of two nights. Cool guys.) Luckily, we found the adorable restaurant and inn Hotel Duc de Bourgogne. It’s right on the canal, super quaint and old-fashioned and perfect for the broogie vibe. The old-fashionedness means there weren’t enough outlets, and I wish each room could control its own heating, but there were no real problems on those fronts. The staff was super nice and accommodating.

The hotel/restaurant is the white building on this canal. One of those windows was ours!

Aside from the loveliness and the chocolate, the best part about Bruges is the dog-human ratio. EVERYONE WHO LIVES THERE HAS A DOG. We saw so many adorbsy puppos my head almost sploded. I took lots of pics (more in my instagram stories, Bruges highlight) but here are my best friends I made:

Ok bye babies!