In the past couple of weeks, the autumn season has hit the Black Forest in full force and it is beautiful!
One thing I always look forward to when I travel through Europe is the hotel rooms. In America, a hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room. They're all pretty much the same size, have the same layout, and the same predictable hotel cable TV. In Europe...you never really know what you're going to get and I love that!
I've stayed in all kinds of price ranges from cheap 8 euro a night hostels to some pricier places that feel, well, quite American. But I usually sleep in some lower-priced budget hotels (40-70 euros a night...except for London where it's a confirmed miracle to find anything under 100 pounds a night!) that usually consist of mix-matchy furniture, towels that came from somebody's mother's linen closet, and sometimes there's a bathroom in the room, sometimes the shower's in the room and the toilet's down the hall, and sometimes you get a sink and the shower and toilet are shared by the floor. Sometimes there's a TV, often there's not, and I don't know that I've ever had an alarm clock included in my room.
Almost always they are housed in some ancient European building with rustic medieval wooden beams or beautiful 19th century ceiling molding and the rooms often have some odd size as a result from creating several rooms from what use to be one large space. I never know how big or small they're going to be...for example, when I took my sister and her husband to Paris last year, they stayed in a room that was at least three times the size of my decently sized single room with a ceiling probably twice as high, but in Amsterdam I had quite a nicely sized bathroom in my stylishly decorated room but with just enough space on either side of my bed that I could place my bottle of water and travel alarm clock between the bed and the wall but I had to crawl over the end of the bed to get in and out...smallest room ever!
But they are always clean and neat, always have very friendly staff (which is often the married couple that own the place), a heavenly, light yet filling European breakfast ("good morning, hot chocolate, baguettes and Nutella!") and I've never had a disappointed stay...if sometimes a surprising one!
My cute little hotel in Bruges was no exception!
Cute, medieval building with mix-matchy furniture including a big cozy bed!
A married couple staff that kept my room clean and served me a simply divine breakfast!
But when I first checked in, I noticed this little box on the wall outside my room...
With this sign written in several different languages...
Three guesses who checked into room number 7 (with the only fire escape on the floor)....!
I laughed so hard when I saw that! Thankfully, I never awoke to the sound of breaking glass and a key fumbling in my door. With or without the smell of smoke!
I love paper. Stationary, greeting cards, an empty journal, blank or decorated...paper is a happy thing with so many possibilities.
On one of my days in Bruges I took a guided bike ride around the countryside outside Bruges.
Belgium is one of those flat low countries of Europe where there are almost more bicycles than people, so a bike ride felt a necessary thing to really experience that Flemish corner of Belgium. I grew up in the flat plains of Oklahoma and Texas so even through I've lived in several mountainous and hilly places since then, I've always felt so comfortable being surrounded by flat lands and wide skies. And the low land of Flanders was so, so beautiful!
Our guide rode us out along the canals lined with poplar trees that lean to one side because of the constant wind from the sea--the wind blowing through the poplars, our guide commented, is the true sound of Flanders--to the little town of Damme and back again. We got some history of the area (Flanders was literally Europe's battlefield until their independence and the creation of the Flemish/French/German speaking country of Belgium) and watched the huge (nothing but muscle!) Belgium Blue cows grazing. We passed by windmills and over canals winding their way up to Amsterdam and stopped for coffee, hot chocolate and beers at a canal-side cafe. And passed by a lot of fellow bikers riding from town to town. All accompanied by the sound of the wind blowing through the poplar trees.
You can see all my Bruges photos here including more from my Flemish bike ride!
I spent about 3 days in Bruges, Belgium, September 17 through the 20th. Bruges isn't like Paris or London where you spend your time cramming tons of wonderful things in a few days, picking and choosing what to do and what's going to be skipped because there is just too much to do and too little time.
Bruges is smaller. Bruges is calmer. Bruges is a few beautiful churches, a couple of small (but excellent) museums, and a city center with a few too many tourists (but even the tourists can't manage to ruin Bruges).
But, mostly, Bruges is street after street after street of brick medieval Flemish houses. And you can spend one day doing the museums and churches and all those tourist-y things and the rest of your time strolling the winding streets, getting lost down tiny alleys, resting on a bench in front of a park of swans, cruising down canals not even bothering to pay attention to the tour guide, stepping out of the way of horse drawn carriages again and again, browsing through an antique market, taking way too many photos of way too many beautiful streets and buildings, and dreading the day when the magic has to end and you have to board that train towards home.
At least that's what I did.
And that's just a sampling of all the ridiculous beauty Bruges had to offer. I mean really ridiculous. I'm going to have to show you some more photos because really, it's just impossible to take a bad photo in Bruges so click here for my Flickr set of Bruges. (And there are even more great photos I didn't upload onto Flickr. Ridiculous.)
So, I went to Belgium a couple of weeks ago and it was amazing! I knew it was going to be amazing so that was no surprise. There were many cool things about my little trip, but one of the coolest was the nice surprise when got my train ticket and I found that I had over an hour and a half wait in the Cologne, Germany train station switching trains on my way to Belgium on September 17th.
Cologne is known for it's big beautiful cathedral begun (as it stands now) in the mid-1200s and so I hoped that would be enough time to go find and see it. I was delighted to find out that the cathedral is literally at the front doorstep of the train station so I was able to spend all my extra time straining my neck up at stained glass windows and stone saints and towering vaulted ceilings amongst chapel altarpieces and working art conservators and praying pilgrims and burning candles.
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Remember that my shop is still having a 10% off the listed price sale in celebration of EtsyBaby's first birthday...but only through October 10th!
