Ohh, Bruges!

Katie's alarm went off at 9:00 to Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" (what's up with the Coldplay?? I don't know) and she looked over at Nicole, who hadn't moved a muscle, so Katie went back to sleep for a half hour. Then we got up and got ready for our day.
We caught tram 1 to the train station where we picked up some Belgian waffles and bought our train tickets to Bruges! Once in Bruges, we jumped off the train to find it a bit wet outside. We threw our hoods on and headed for the first visible church--because apparently Bruges doesn't believe in selling maps, at least none that we could find. We checked out that church, which was very large and beautiful. Then we finally found a street map and tried to make our way to the Markt, but ended up at another church. So we just wandered around the town, buttoned our jackets all the way up because of the rain and wind, and took it all in. We went inside another big and beautiful church (none of these pictures turned out by the way, moms and dads- but we really were there! :) So after seeing the churches, we tried wandering in the direction of the train station when Katie saw a sign: CHOCO-STORY! A whole museum dedicated to nothing but the history of chocolate! We couldn't pass it up! It was actually very interesting and informative- bet you didn't know the oldest traces of the cocoa bean are from 600 B.C.!
We were going to buy some chocolate for some of you back home, but they only had HUGE bags for sale! Sorry! After that we were ready to head back to Ghent, so we kept walking in the direction towards the train station...or so we thought! Finally we asked someone for directions and she said, " Yes, keep walking down this street." We came across a street map and to our surprise we were on the other side of town!! And even though Bruge is a small town, it was cold and rainy and we were not too excited about the walk. We sucked it up and started heading toward the station, all bundeled up.
We finally made it there and had 25 minutes before our train back to Ghent left. So we grabbed a couple of sandwhiches and cokes! Once we got back to Ghent, the plan was to buy our train tickets to Paris, but of course...we forgot! We managed to make back to the boys house, safe and sound and we were very thankful to be out of Belgiums cold weather!
We logged onto the computer and were thankful to find that we were accepted to surf someones couch in Paris and Florence!
Since we had such a late lunch we decided to skip dinner and get some reading down and figure out the next couple of days in Belgium! We also got a chance to look at Nick and Stan's (the host we were staying with)current architecture project-which was the redesign for the expansion of their schools library. We were exhausted by then, and called it an early night--which in Blegium times means about 11 pm!!