Brugge

Today I took a day trip up to the Belgian town of Brugge (aka Bruges). It was only an hour or so from Brussels by train, but it is in a very different part of Belgium. In Brussels and the Southern Part of Belgium, French is the commonly spoken language. The Northern part of Belgium is Flemish speaking. I'm not really sure exactly what that means, but I think it is similar to Dutch which of course is spoken in The Netherlands or Holland. That all makes perfect sense. I wasn't really sure what language to try to speak, English or French, if I went into a restaurant or a store. My solution was just to point at what I wanted and the people would generally speak English back to me. Brugge is a very nice medieval town with lots of canals. It is very scenic, and consequently it has lots of tourists, especially English and American tourists. I think I heard English spoken more today than I had in the last two weeks.