I arrived in Bruges at about 11:30 AM yesterday by train. If you have not seen the movie In Bruges ... check it out ... one of the sleeper great movies in the last ten years in my opinion.
Bruges was the centre of Belgium commerce in the Middle Ages ... it's wealth derived from trade of silks, furs, Asian carpets, wine, fruits .... and exotic pets! Bruges canal network allowed it the distinction of being the busiest 'port' in the 1400s ... then in the 1500s it lost that dominance and it never recovered ... in the 1800s a campaign of preservation and restoration was begun ... that today yields a city trapped in time.
Bruges is easily accessible by foot and there is a picture everywhere you turn ... this also has it's down side. Bruges is a major tourist destination and even on a Wednesday in mid May by mid-afternoon it was crawling with bus loads of folks being lead about by very loud and obnoxious tour guides. The canal boat operators were even short tempered and it was not even the high season of July/August ... there was a group of Italians waiting to get on the canal boat ... there were two boats just sitting there ... one Italian was trying to convince the tour operator, through sheer voice of vocal volume ... to bring one of those boats over ... the young boat operator was explaining in an equal vocal volume ... that there are rules and if you did not want to wait why did you buy a ticket ... great fun to watch ...
I took the canal boat ride ... a great way to see part of the town and get a sense of what it must have been like in it's hay day ... and a beautiful sunny day to boot ... to quench my thirst I had a Bruges Trippel ... a blond ... very good body and a spicy finish .. yes .. it's a beer ..
After the canal ride I walked around the canal system itself and then I made my way back to the main Markt area .. similar to the Grand Place in Brussels ... there was a large market going on so I purchased some cheese and yes ... frites ... unbelievably good with mayo (that had had mustard mixed) ...
I sat down at an open air cafe and had another Trippel ... there was a man playing some kind of musical contraption ... he basically fed it a 'book' that had it's pages pre-punched ... he wound the pages in manually and the device played a tune ... not quite a calliope ... not quite an accordion ... something stranded in between ...
I got to thinking .. always dangerous ... like .. hold my beer and watch this .. you get the idea ... anyway I got to thinking ... those holes in the paper aren't the note ... there however are symbols for the symbol of a musical note ... if the paper simply had musical notes or symbols ... the device wouldn't play even though the information on the paper could be played by a human skilled enough to both read it and to play an instrument to render it ... musical symbols ... what if that was the symbol I was looking for ... well ... there is an easy way to determine that ... I will visit the Musee of Musical Instruments in Brussels tomorrow ...
But right now another Trippel seems the most common sense thing to do ... yes ... it certainly does ...
To quote from verse 1401 of the Krome Koan,
' ... beer doesn't make you fat ... it makes you lean .. against bars, tables, chairs and walls ... '
The G.R. Ale Hunter (aka The Night Templar)
No comments:
Post a Comment