After a week with our friends, we parted company and headed on to new adventures. We drove back to Bergerac to drop off the rental car, then spent about ten hours on trains. (Though we've been to Paris twice on this trip, we've been below ground both times, transferring from one train station to another, and haven't seen anything more interesting than metro stops.)
We arrived in the city of Brugge on Saturday evening. I've always called it Bruges, which is OK, but it's in the northern part of Belgium which is more Dutch-like than French-like, and it seems more respectful to use the name the locals use.
Brugge was a big important city in the 14th and 15th centuries, but its harbor silted up and the economy collapsed. Now it's smaller, not so important, but wow is it charming. Here are some examples of the absolutely typical architecture in the market square:
Here (in your face, Willie Brown) is the city hall:
Hundreds of years ago, another important building was the Belfort, seen here at a distance beyond one of Brugge's many canals. (Residents of the Millenium Tower, note that the Belfort tower has been leaning about four feet since 17-something, and they've been monitoring it ever since.)
If you climb the 350 or so steps up he tower (as we of course did), you get a great view:
There's a carillon in the tower, playing tunes on the many bells from time to time. The bells can be played by a person at a console, somewhat as an organ is played, though it's all mechanical, not electric, and the musician literally pounds his fists on the levers. It can also be controlled by a drum that's like a giant old-fashioned music box with pegs that cause the bells' cables to be pulled when the drum turns. The drum is periodically reprogrammed (to use a 20th-century term), which means that someone moves all those pegs so that a different song will be played. (Sorry about the reflected windows in this photo, but maybe they'll help you get a sense of scale.)
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