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Showing posts with label Bruges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruges. Show all posts

Monday, October 8, 2018

Visiting Bruges (Belgium) to View the Memling Museum by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Bruges (Belgium) to View the Memling Museum by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I went on a solo trip to Brussels (Belgium) to visit my Detroit buddy Eileen, who had recently graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) and was working as a consultant for the European Union.

I knew Mick Jagger also attended the LSE and asked her if she was going to promote “European music for mega money in the EU and abroad.”

“More like cheese and wine,” she said probably wondering when Peter Pan Ruth was going to grow up.

As ever, the first order of business when doing business in a country that is French or has some sort of French heritage is to eat.  We walked from the train station to her apartment and picked up a few items at Delhaize Supermarket on the way home.

We ate a light dinner of prosciutto, smoke salmon, lettuce with blue cheese dressing, and fruit salad with slices of baguette and Kerrygold butter. 

We drank a Sauvignon de Touraine with our little meal and went to sleep to early, so we could get up bright and early for a trip to Brouges the next day.

I love taking the train to Bruges.  The fields around Bruges are green, the canals are clean and shimmer, and swans glide along the canals on the way into town.

We went to the Central Train Station to go to Bruges.  The train originated in Cologne, Germany, so we had to stand all the way to our destination, but we did not care.  We were having fun, laughing about the books we were reading and wondering where we could eat waterzooi, a Flemish fish stew in Belgium.

When we arrived, we went to the Memling Museum in Bruges.  The Museum holds two rooms of art that is very important to the Flemish people.

The most stunning piece was a casket for the relics of Saint Ursula.  According to the legend that Memling painted, the devout Ursula refused to marry the pagan English prince Etheric until he converted.

Ursula was a demanding woman and also insisted on having three years to make a pilgrimage to Rome with 11,000 virgins.

Ursula was martyred en route for refusing the advances of the King of the Huns.  The tale was quite popular in the Middle Ages.

It was noon, so we went to eat.  Eileen and I walked around and checked out menus before choosing a restaurant with good food at reasonable prices.

We ordered in English not French.  Even I knew that the Flemish regions around French-speaking Brussels were rather snooty about speaking Germanic languages, which include Flemish, Dutch, and English.

Eileen and I were twins and ordered the same thing.  We started our meal with puréed carrot soup.  Our next course was grilled salmon with a light, cream of tomato sauce with a side of sheet pan baked potatoes.

I can make puréed carrot soup, sheet pan baked potatoes, and grilled salmon with a light, cream of tomato sauce now and save a lot of money.

Dessert was a scoop of highly perfumed vanilla ice cream with a slice of musk melon.

After lunch, we spent a lot of time touring town on foot looking at homes, flowers, swans, and the canals with clean water that reflected everything in the sunlight.

We visited a cookware store and a bookstore.  Surprisingly, there were many English-language books in the store.  It reminded me of the FNAC International Bookstore in Paris with the exception that the FNAC had magazines, newspapers, and books in many languages, especially those of the European Union.

We made our way back to the train station and were happy to find seats after all the walking we had done.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




Ruth Paget Selfie





Saturday, September 8, 2018

Exploring Bruges: Visiting Belgium's Venice with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget







Exploring Bruges: Visiting Belgium’s Venice with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



I loved being able to take the train to Brussels, Belgium from the Gare du Nord in Paris (France) to visit my Detroit buddy Eileen, who worked for the European Union after finishing her master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Eileen took a vacation day, so we could visit the picture-perfect town of Bruges.  Bruges is full of canals with swans.  We rolled Florence around in her baby stroller looking for restaurants and just enjoying being outside for the day.

Bruges is a beautiful, distant suburb of Brussels for upper management, who could do consulting work at home.

We eventually decided on a restaurant.  Eileen and I both had a savory, tomato soup and Italian omelets called fritattas.  We were feeling pretty good, because we drank Duvel (Flemish for ‘Devil’) and Geuze wheat beers with our garlic toast and omelets.

We walked around Bruges for another three hours.  The Eglise Nôtre had a beautiful Madonna and Child sculpture in it by Michelangelo that was a surprise find for us.

The swans on the canals enchanted me as did the lace makers on the curving, cobbled streets, who set up shop next to chocolate stores.  I felt like I was walking through a wonderland.

We ate Leonidas chocolates on the way home and counted swans on the canals on the way out of town.


By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




Ruth Paget Selfie