Bruges

(16/4/2011) We already had plans for April, and in order to keep our food money for the month, we avoid doing more than one plan per month.  But this time, Sergio is coming from Thursday 14 until Monday 25, and from the 20 to the 25 we are going to visit Stockholm. Since there was no plans for the weekend, and by chance I found some brochure for Liege, I decided to check on the ticket prices.  They were pretty cheap, so I told Sergio, and he said that he preferred Bruges, so I checked again and found a very nice offer, from Aachen to Liege for 11,90 Euros and from Liege to Bruges for 10,30 Euros.

So we booked the tickets, and started looking for a Hostal -Hotels are not that cheap, the cheapest that we found was 90 euros per night-. I asked around, but at the end we did not book anything, we decided to simply try our luck there (bad idea...)

We started our trip on saturday at 8:30 am. We stopped in Liege at 10.30 and took some pictures, it looked promessing, but we decided to go first to Bruges and then, on the way back, to Liege. We finally reached Bruges at something like 1 pm (after some stops in Brussels, and some food).
We started exploring, by going in to the middle of the town, basically following all the other tourists, and taking pictures in the way.
We reached a very beautiful square, filled with cafés and restaurants, and we found live music, an amazing orchestra playing right there. We went to the river and found out that all the swans belong to the city (and they are all marked), and of course we took more pictures ;)
We visited then the Basilica of the Holly Blood, amazingly beautiful! and as a side story, we found a sign bewaring turists about pickpocketing, we found that interesting, in a place so calm, so organized, so polite, even here one find thieves.
We saw the Burg square, with the city hall and the Markt.
The cherry of the trip was a boat ride in the channels, asking the swans permission to pass by :), discovering the oldest houses around the channel and the beauty of the arquitecture, lightened by the flowers of the spring.
Thinking of our pocket we had a fast food lunch, in the middle of the markt.

Later that day we went to see the Madrid Barcelona game in a samll pub, and after that we looked for a hostal, hotel or anything, but everything was full, so we spent our night walking around and in the Bruges train station. Next day we took the first train back, and needless to say, we were too tired to stop in Liege.

As a day trip, this was much more than anyone can ask.

Bruges

(16/4/2011) We already had plans for April, and in order to keep our food money for the month, we avoid doing more than one plan per month.  But this time, Sergio is coming from Thursday 14 until Monday 25, and from the 20 to the 25 we are going to visit Stockholm. Since there was no plans for the weekend, and by chance I found some brochure for Liege, I decided to check on the ticket prices.  They were pretty cheap, so I told Sergio, and he said that he preferred Bruges, so I checked again and found a very nice offer, from Aachen to Liege for 11,90 Euros and from Liege to Bruges for 10,30 Euros.

So we booked the tickets, and started looking for a Hostel -Hotels are not that cheap, the cheapest that we found was 90 euros per night-. I asked around, but at the end we did not book anything, we decided to simply try our luck there (bad idea...)

We started our trip on Saturday at 8:30 am. We stopped in Liege at 10.30 and took some pictures, it looked promising, but we decided to go first to Bruges and then, on the way back, to Liege.

We finally reached Bruges at something like 1 pm (after some stops in Brussels, and some food).
We started exploring, by going in to the middle of the town, basically following all the other tourists, and taking pictures in the way.

We reached a very beautiful square, filled with cafes and restaurants, and we found live music, an amazing orchestra playing right there. 

We went to the river and found out that all the swans belong to the city (and they are all marked), and of course we took more pictures ;)

We visited then the Basilica of the Holly Blood, amazingly beautiful! and as a side story, we found a sign bewaring tourists about pickpocketing, we found that interesting, in a place so calm, so organized, so polite, even here one find thieves.

We saw the Burg square, with the city hall and the Markt.





The cherry of the trip was a boat ride in the channels, asking the swans permission to pass by :), discovering the oldest houses around the channel and the beauty of the architecture, lightened by the flowers of the spring. All this while eating Belgian chocolate, what else?
Thinking of our pocket we had a fast food lunch, in the middle of the square.

Later that day we went to see the Madrid Barcelona game in a small pub, and after that we looked for a hostel, hotel or anything, but everything was full, so we spent our night walking around and in the Bruges train station. Next day we took the first train back, and needless to say, we were too tired to stop in Liege.

As a day trip, this was much more than anyone can ask.

Iniciando

Bueno pronto actualizaremos mas cosas.....

Hello...

Everyone that knows us, knows that we enjoy making short 'get-aways', short trips to relax and see new places. When we lived in Bogotá, we used to take our car and go to warmer places, just for a weekend, or to small towns. Every 'Holy week' (Easter) was a perfect excuse for a trip with friends, we had many and they were very good, and we even did a long trip along Colombia, with the excuse of getting a diving certificate :P
Now that we live in Europe, we have the perfect excuse to travel: to see each other!, we have tried to see new places and to make the most of our short time.
We decided to start this blog, as a memory of many trips and those to come, to give the tips that we've learned and to tell you about our 'adventures'.
Since Sergio is not a very elocuent writer (or talker for that matter) I will probably write most of the entries.  With time, I hope to collect here all of our trip memories, and to have it as a way to remember friends, places, moments, when our own memory fails us :D

Porto and Finisterra

And every photo we had was stolen!

There is always a catalyst, something that gives you a push, this trip was our catalyst to write this blog.

I had in my wish list (a very long list, I know) to see the end of the earth. So my tour agent, Sergio, got Ryanair tickets to Oporto, and we rented a car in Portugal, just a couple of hours away from Cape Finisterre.
We were smart enough to pay full insurance for the car, and we got a room in a cheap hotel: Hotel Premium Porto - Centro, they offered nice rooms and in house parking, so that was everything we needed. The hotel was in an area of not so nice houses, many of them seemed abandoned, and we got a room in the 1 floor (not the ground-floor, for my non european friends). And I kept thinking how easy it could be to just go in the room and run in to the abandoned houses across the street. And as every self fulfilling prophecy, it was my own fear what got us into trouble.
The first day we strolled around Porto, a very picturesque city, the colors and the old architecture create an amazing environment.
The second day we went to Finisterre, and it was as amazing as one can imagine. It is really beautiful and standing in the edge of the rock, one can really understand why they thought it was the end of the world. At this location, many pilgrims end their Camino de Santiago trip, a spiritual walk to honor the apostle Saint James the Great passing through the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Sergio asked a street vendor, the only person other than us there, where should we eat, and following her recommendation, we ate in a local fisherman restaurant what was probably the best fish I have ever tasted, and Sergio overdosed in fresh clams. We took the rest of the day to visit Santiago de Compostela, with a cathedral as impressive as it can be.  The town is small and very symmetric, it gives a movie feeling.

On our second day we went the other way, towards Fatima. This sanctuary is very well known, and a very nice structure. On this day, I asked Sergio to take his bags with him. It so happens that we bought a new 2 TB external hard drive, thinking that our pictures were only stored in Sergio's laptop and in our small hds,  So, something that should not had happened, that both our external drives were in the same place, plus his laptop, plus the new external drive, happened. And because I was scared of someone entering our room, everything went to the car trunk.  We left our rental car in the official parking lot of the sanctuary, Sergio's bag (with all the electronics) was in the trunk and his laptop was under the driver's seat, not on the open view. Sergio left also his jacket in the car, and he forgot to take his passport out (OUCH). When we came out of the sanctuary, the car electric system was totally kaputt, the thieves had broken in, they took the laptop and Sergio´s bag, gladly, they left the jacket there, so at least we had our documents. And gladly, the car was fully insured, because the key system was not working after that.  We went to the police, and they were very nice, but told us that it was very common for rental cars to be robbed of their contents (so if you rent a car in Portugal, get the full insurance, just in case). He took our data, but told us that very likely we will never see our things again.  And that is how we lost all of our pictures, 11 years of pictures gone. Plus some family pictures.
That was the end of the trip for us, the remaining day and a half we were just walking around Porto,to sad and angry to care about sightseeing.
We are active(annoying) facebook sharers, because our families follow our steps through the pictures we post there. And thanks to facebook, we recovered some of the pictures, and we decided to start this blog and to store out pictures in as many places as possible.