360-degree photos are in Flickr.com (taken with my LG 360).
That's the number of steps going up to the Bruges belfry. Yup, I climbed all of them, up and down.I watched the movie "In Bruges" when I read about it in Rick Steves's book. Although the movie was dark, Bruges is actually a very nice town. And it's crawling with tourists!
It was a two-hour trip each way, so it was already 1pm when I arrived at the Markt. I stopped by a sushi house anyway for a quick lunch, then I took pictures at the square.
Then I got in line for a ticket (€10) and got a couple of souvenir tokens/coins for €2 each.
The bottom stairs were made of stone and have worn out in places. They were as smooth as river stones. At some point, the steps became wooden and narrower.
About half the time, there were no railings and the only thing you could hang on to was a thick rope around the spine of the stairs.
There were at least two rooms that broke the climb. The first one was a room with displays of small bells and you had to cross that room to go up the next set of stairs. The second one was a smaller room off to the side with a large bell protected by a thick plastic wall. I thought it was just a normal landing with a bench to rest on and a window to the bell until I saw a couple behind the bell.
The spiraling of the stairs also switched between clockwise and counter at least twice, and that also felt like a break.
The windows at the top were covered by a tight mesh. I could only get the tip of my lens through. There were two large bells in the middle and unknown smaller bells above us. Some wooden scaffolding held them all in place.
The barrier that surrounded the larger bells was an even tighter mesh so I could only get pictures of parts of the bells, and part of the mesh was still in the picture.
The bells sang twice while I was up there. It didn't have a specific melody and it actually sounded like it was all random but melodious. Surprisingly, the decibel level wasn't too high, even though the sound could be heard from far away. I've been to worse concerts that gave me headaches.
Going up was hard on my heart and my shins, but going down was hard on my hips and my knees. But there were very few people there. The climb probably scared most of the tourists. So I was able to take my time going down.
I was about to head to the Burg Square when I saw the CitySightseeing van. Unfortunately, it wasn't a hop-on-hop-off bus. It was just a continuous 50-minute tour for €20. At least I saw more while my feet and legs got rested.
Afterward, I went on to the Burg Square, which was really just a long block away. I took more pictures, bought chocolates, watched a musician and his marionette, and headed to the Church of Our Lady.
The church closed at 4:30pm and it was already 5:30pm, but I saw reviews that said the church was under renovation, so most of the inside was out of limits anyway. So I went just to take pictures of the outside. It was a 7-minute walk.
The busses must have stopped running already because Google Maps was making me walk 18 minutes back to the train station instead of taking a bus back.
It was still daylight and there were a lot of people around, and many of them were headed to the station too.
I got a chicken wrap and water at Starbucks at the station and had already eaten it by the time the train arrived.
I thought of taking Uber this time but the app was making me walk to the other end of the station, so I gave up and walked again.
No almost-thieves this time, but a young lady and a couple with suitcases seemed suspicious of me, even though they overtook me. When I got home, I realized that my hair was standing up because of the wind. I suppose I looked really scary. :)
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