Today's destination to explore: Bruges.

We started our day with a 40 minute walk into town from our hotel then started the Lonely Planet recommended self-guided walking tour around historic Bruges. Bruges is a very picturesque, medieval town on the west side of Belgium that has been described as the Venice of the North. We'd heard good things about Bruges from friends and we were glad not to be disappointed :) While the town in quite touristy it definitely isn't in-your-face touristy.

Today's highlights would be Belgium's big three: beer, frites (fries) and chocolate :) Any day including these three has to be a good one!

One of the destinations on our walking tour was Herberg Vlissinghe, Bruges' oldest pub which was established in 1515. You can't just take a photo from the outside so we dutifully head in to enjoy some another Belgian beer each :) Today I had a raspberry beer which actually tasted a bit more like beer than yesterday's cherry beer ... but was still delicious.

Next stop, the Frites museum - yes you did read that correctly, they have set up an entire museum dedicated to fries. There was lots of reading to do but it was surprisingly quite interesting. They went through all sorts of information about the potato - like where it came from, the different types and what they can be used for, it's medicinal uses (we never knew there were any) and lists of potato related world records. Eventually they got to a thorough explanation about fries, including how fries should be cooked. We learnt that you should double fry your chips for the best, least soggy outcome. To end our education experience we tried authentic Belgian fries. Much to Brett's disappointment, they cook with beef fat, but he did say they weren't as bad as NZ's animal fat fried chips.

Final one of the big three, chocolate ... where else to go but Chocolate Story, a chocolate museum :) (there are museums for everything over here!). Again there was lots of reading but it too was interesting. They went through the history of the cocoa bean starting with the Aztecs, how cocoa is produced nowadays, the ingredients for dark/milk/white chocolate and how chocolate is made. The museum tour finishes up with a chocolate making demonstration. At the end you get to try a piece ... mmmm! The Belgians definitely know how to make chocolate!!!

After walking many, many kilometres we headed back to the hotel and made our way to Antwerp for the night.

- Rebecca