Little old town, Big old town

Wednesday 20/6, we headed off for Brugge today and chose to go via Poperinge (a little town along the way). We have found that choosing a small town along the way, away from the freeways and expressways causes Annie to take us along country roads. Here we see the real scenery, not hidden by sound barriers. Another thing Annie is good at is taking us to the actual “Market Square” centre of the old town. This usually involves bouncing along very old cobble stone streets, some one-way and just wide enough for a car and a bicycle to pass. Some of these streets don’t even have foot paths. The ones that do have foot paths, have sacrificed ¾ of the footpath to car parking space. Poperinge was a very nice little old town. Here we had a coffee and a very interesting chat with the owner. Poperinge is in Belguim, and we have found them and the Dutch very fluent in English. Actually, we found this true in every town that we visited while on the river cruise. This is even true for older people, especially if they are involved in hospitality or tourism. On the other hand we have not found this true so far in France. One of the waitresses (about 20+) in the restaurant at our hotel doesn’t appear to speak English. The other one, speaks English the way I spoke French in year 10, 45 years ago. In many countries, school students learn English from age 10, and in some countries they learn several languages. I don’t think this is true for France. Back to the coffee shop owner in Poperinge, one of his friend’s daughters lives in Australia somewhere in the outback where her neighbour is a one hour drive away. He finds this hard to comprehend as it takes less than 3 hours to drive from one side of Belgium to the other. After our coffee and chat, we headed for Brugge, a big old town. Parking on the streets in the centre of Brugge is non-existent. We eventually found an underground car-park, the entrance to which is off a tunnel. Our map showed where the car-park was, but not where the entrance was. It took quite a lot of round and round driving to find the entry, and to make things worse, I kept avoiding the tunnel, because who would expect to find a car-park entry in the wall of a tunnel? We spent all of the afternoon walking around Brugge. Again many spectacular buildings, but a big cathedral doesn’t look quite as impressive in a big town, as a big church does in a small town. The upper chapel of the Basilica of the Holy Blood was especially impressive inside, but unfortunately we were 10 minutes late so we did not get to see the venerated relic, a phial said to contain cloth with the blood of Jesus Christ. After a late afternoon snack of warm apple tart for Jean and a Brussels waffle with ice-cream and chocolate sauce for George, we headed back to St Omer, the quick way via a 130 km/hr expressway. Upon arrival back at St Omer, we walked across the road and then around the outside of a magnificent white stone cathedral, the Saint-Omer Cathedral known in French as Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Saint-Omer (a national monument of France).