In Bruges...

"And I realized, f**, maybe that's what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in f*** Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die"
Ray ~ In Bruges

Although "In Bruges" is Belgium's answer to Quentin Tarantino and the Cohen Brothers combined, and definitely worth watching, assuming you're OK with 126 f-bombs dropped in a little over an hour and a half, a plot centered around three hitmen, a neo nazi, a dwarf, and a prostitute, and lots of useless violence, although the movie is awesome in spite of, or because of, all of that, I can firmly claim that Bruges is not hell. It is, in fact, the closest to the most perfectly historical, preserved, pretty, quaint, and quintessential European city there is. And I know this because when traveling to Holland for Christmas this year, husband-dear and I selected Bruges from a large selection of European cities (Paris, Brussels, Aachen. Venice, Trier, among others) as the destination of our four-day pre-Christmas getaway.

When planning this year's Christmas vacation, we knew from the start that we wanted to incorporate some DixieChick-Husband-dear alone time. We try to do this every year, and since the last time we had some husband-wife time that did not involve a marathon, a triathlon, or a mountainbike race, was in the spring of 2011, when we went on the cruise of a lifetime, we figured we were long overdue. We had several, fairly random criteria: It had to be cute and quaint (obviously. I mean, we live in a town made up of stripmalls, we need to be reminded that not the entire world is this ugly every once in a while); it had to not be in Germany (since husband-dear vowed he could not handle yet another German Christmas market after years of seeing nothing else in the month of December), and we had to be able to get there by train (husband-dear, who does not have the Dutch-student-life-public-transportation trauma I do, loves traveling by train).

After some fairly random internet searches ("I think Lara once told me Aachen is really cute. Let's look at Aachen..oh no, that looks way too German. No, we can't do that.") and equally random decision processes ("I'd like Paris, but you know we have been there before, and then if we were to go, I'd feel all this pressure to see all the right things and eat at all the right places. I mean, what if there's this awesome bistro everyone knows about, and we miss it? That would be horrible"), we decided on Bruges. Neither one of us had ever been there before, and our knowledge about the town was restricted to what I was able to recall from reading a single children's book about the middle ages, whose first chapter takes place in Bruges (yes, Dutch readers, that would be this book). After glancing at a few pictures of a beautiful town square decorated for Christmas with hundreds of lights and a real ice skating rink in the middle, our decision was made. We were going to Bruges.

For the next few weeks, TripAdvisor became my best friend, and after weighing the pros and cons of various hotels ("this one looks pretty from the outside, but the rooms look horrible", and "I am not staying in anything that's a chain. I don't care of it's a Belgian chain. I refuse to do anything chain-ish outside of here"), as well as the sanity of some of the reviewers ("Well, they claim the rooms are not up to par, but they also claim that the front desk clerk was 'merely formal' and 'seemed automated', so I'm not too sure about them"), we decided to spend all the kids' college money (OK I lie, all of Jimmie's college money) on a fairly nice hotel a few minutes away from the main square. Once that was done, we booked traintickets on the much-disparaged Fyra, and started to count down the days.

And Bruges delivered. Our four days there were absolutely magical. We had absolutely wonderful meals, sampled lots and lots of wine, spent days meandering through the gorgeous "egg" (the medieval town center), randomly stopping at the various churches liberally sprinkled throughout the town, climbed the belfry, went to a brewery, climbed one of the old city gates, got lost and used the many church spires to find our way back, saw Michaelangelo's sculpture of Mary and baby Jesus, walked all the way around the old city walls, ate far too much chocolate, drank more really good cappuccinos than I can count, and took lots of baths in the hot tub in our room. If you are ever in the position that you can only go to one city in Europe, I say forget Paris and go to Bruges. It has it all, but more, and all within walking distance.

For your benefit, I have enclosed some of my hundred or so pictures below.