Yesterday I wrote about how my mood had caused me to lose I joy I was having for this trip. I am happy to say that today I felt so much better and was feeling more like myself…and it was a great this too because today we spent the majority of the day in Bruges.

It never ceases to amaze me how each of these different Belgian cities can look remarkably similar and yet have such distinctive beauty. Whether it be from the rolling hills of the countryside to the distinctive dutch/french architecture, each city is uniquely beautiful.

We started the day like the previous ones with a quick morning breakfast before taking the bus up north to the city of Bruges. When we arrived, it was extremely shocking to me the sheer size of the historic city. It’s a tight knit city that is extremely walkable and almost impossible to get lost. I mentioned earlier that we had a tour guide take our group on these trips and today was no exception. I believe that I can speak for the entire group when I say that his touring style and almost demeaning attitude sucked all of the joy out of our Antwerp trip and I was definitely not going no let him do it again while in Brugge. So I took a little bit of initiative and broke off from the group with Crista and started exploring for ourselves to fully immerse ourselves in the city. We admired the beautiful architecture, talked to a few locals, visited the church with the Michelangelo painting and when into a couple of museums. When we got hungry, we visited a frites shop and had the most delicious double fried frites in the history of the world (with mayo of course). Later, we joined up with the rest of the group to bask in the beauty of the city. Where we saw street statue performers

The bell tower

And I went solo into the museum of the oldest hospital in Europe: Sint Janshospitaal

This hospital was run solely by nuns and public support during a time when medicine was in its juvenile phase.

Once we all got back together, we took the bus ride home and all decided to make tonight round two of karaoke at O’Reiley’s and tore the place apart with our glorious singing voices and sexy dance moves.