Woke up today and could hardly walk. I must be getting old. 2 days of 8-10 hrs of walking and my legs are so stiff I walked like an old man for the first hr. Took a day trip to Brugge. The train system is a bit hard to make out. There is no way I would have found the right track if I hadn’t asked at the ticket counter. Once on the train things were pretty easy getting off at the right stop.
Very cool place. Coble stone roads, and old 17th & 18th century buildings (at least that’s my impression of them) water ways throughout the town. It rained all day, but not too hard so was not a real problem.
An interesting thing happened. Remember French is the dominate language, but they also speak Dutch. A girl came up to me and asked me if I speak Dutch. Turns out she is from Israel. She asked me where she could find the boat rides. It didn’t dawn on me until after I walked away. “How did I know she asked me if I could speak Dutch?” She must have been speaking English when she asked me if I spoke Dutch. An Israeli girl (in a French town) asked me if I spoke Dutch in English????????????? That would be like someone coming up to you in Cincinnati and in Japanese asking if you spoke German?
I actually used a map this time. I actually used 3 maps. They got progressively more close up. The big one showed the whole area including the out line areas. The smallest map just showed the down town area but in lots of detail. I would walk north for a while then all of a sudden I would show up on the east side of town. So I would back track and all of a sudden I would show up on the north edge of the map.
It took me half the day and getting lost 3 times before I realized the middle map was turned 80 deg from the others. The big one had north pointing up. The Middle one had west pointing up but there was no arrow on the map to show you where north was. Once I figured that out everything went smooth.
