One of the places that we really wanted to visit was Bruges. Before we retired, Bob had this strange idea to start a movie club. Like a book club, but with movies instead. With three other highly compatible couples from our neighborhood, we took turns choosing a movie and met once a month for snacks/dinner to discuss. A lot of fun.

One of the couples (thanks, Sara and Gerry) always came up with movies that were just a little bit different. Always interesting, but almost always something the rest of us would never have watched on our own. One was about pharmaceutical testing in Africa (forget the name), one was Lives of Others (about East Germany before the fall), and one was In Bruges.

In Bruges is a dark suspense/comedy(?) about two hit men trying to escape from a job that they bungled badly. It is violent and dark. But the location shots of the city were beautiful and prompted us to include it prominently on our list of places to visit.

So, instead of a day trip from Brussels, Bob suggested that we spend three nights and two full days in the city. We decided to walk from the train station to our Airbnb (approximately thirty minutes, we thought), but that turned out to be a little much in our weakened condition. So we stopped for a shandy (beer with lemon/lime). While Marilyn enjoyed her drink and some marzipan, Bob wandered around one of the many churches and the first of many canals.

When we recovered from the first part of our slog and continued our journey to our Airbnb, we discovered a nice little tourist area with a restaurant called Casa Patata. Of course, we had to stop and have dinner. The Belgiums do really funny things with ”french fries”. And next door was a waffle shop which had about a million ways to serve waffles. We only had one each.