Rotaract Road Trip: Brugge & Oostende

I did a quick recap of my vacations (aka. holidays) the past few years and realized that most have been because of Rotary - Chicago, LA, Ireland, Denmark, Germany. It’s pretty much guaranteed that each year I take a Rotary trip to the PreConvention and usually add on my own a pre or post trip on top of it. I go to the PreCons (our cool slang term) because they are loads of fun - there are so many incredible people from all over the world and we form instant friendships through our connection to Rotary!

Pic from PreCon 2010 in Montreal, Canada

So it’s no wonder when my Rotaract friend Lars (on the pic above - on the right in the hat) & I headed on a road trip to Brugge this last weekend we had a great time. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much since I arrived in Belgium. But that’s most likely because Lars has known me for years and not just months like my classmates.

If you’re not familiar with Brugge…well read about it on wiki or to see it with a Hollywood flair check out the movie In Bruges (warning – it’s a bit of a dark comedy and rated R). Some of my non-Belgian-familiar friends might be confused ... Brugge = Bruges, Brugge is the Dutch spelling and Bruges is the English.

Anyway, back to the weekend -
Shortly after arriving we went to the chocolate museum. Yes, I did say the chocolate museum and you can stop drooling now. It was a very educational and interesting place – I learned about the history of chocolate, what makes milk, dark, and white chocolate different, I saw a chocolate Pres Obama and even a chocolate “fountain” Manekin pis that pees chocolate.  I couldn't possibly make that up - see below.

Saturday we went on a night tour of Brugge in the rain. The rain made it a real Belgisch (yes that’s a word – see photo album link below) experience because it rains nearly every day or at least it looks like it’s about to.

On Sunday we hopped a canal ride for a new view of the city and the rain actually stayed away. But see, it still looks like it’s about to rain.

 

And since I’ve never been to the North Sea and Lars has a car, we went up to the coast to Oostende for a seafood dinner.   Still looks like it's going to rain, doesn't it?

Surprisingly, we made it the whole day on Sunday with absolutely NO rain.

It really was a great weekend, I had a lot of laughs, spent time with a good friend and for a weekend I forgot about all my classwork waiting for me in Leuven.

See you later,
Annie

PS – You can click here to see my entire photo album from the wkend.