Transcribed from my journal.
December 24.
Well, here I am in a sandwich shop in the middle of Bruges, sipping hot chocolate and a little buzzed from the cup of mulled wine I had out in the square. The trip in was uneventful – train to London Bridge and then St Pancras International, then Bruxelles-Midi, then here. My hotel room is small but it’s all mine. It’s been months since I had a room to myself.
December 25.
I went off aiming for the Minnewater, but the cathedral bells drew me in and I ended up staying for the mass at Sintsalvatorskathedraal. No one else knew the hymns so I was all right there.
I tell you, the Catholics know how to do religion! First there was grand organ music and then a procession – a white-robed priest holding up a golden crucifix on a pole, then another swinging a censer. Then solemn young altarboys and altargirls in white with wooden crosses. Then solemn, nerdy-looking young priests, also in white. Then priests in cloth-of-gold with red crosses, wearing the crabby kind of expression that comes with not getting laid for about 50 or 60 years. Then one in cloth-of-gold with a mitre on, and a short man who despite not having anything on his head managed to emanate quiet authority. (Later, for some reason, he put on a red yarmulke.) [I went on Wikipedia later and figured out he must have been a Cardinal.]
Once again I intended to go to the Beguinage, but it was lunchtime by the time the service (Mass?) ended. Not as dull as I’d feared. I could catch a few words here and there [everything was in Dutch], and could tell what was a Bible reading and what was a rote reading or brakha, etc.
It being Xmas most places were closed – except – some ancestral instinct perhaps brought me past a Chinese restaurant. I couldn’t NOT go in. But my Chinese side forced me to order just about the only Chinese thing on the menu, ma po tofu. So there I was, eating alone (eccentric!) among my own people [the other patrons, who were probably Jewish], feeling ineffably at home.
After many wanderings through the cold, deserted medieval labyrinth that is Bruges on Christmas Day (the silence broken only by church bells and the odd horse-and-carriage towing tourists) I arrived at the Minnewater, a very pretty canalside park, even in the barrenness of winter. While watching white swans (their necks puffed up against the cold) and geese and hens and ducks fighting over crumbs, standing beside another tourist, I had the opportunity to try out a bit of my French: “Les oies, elles sont méchantes,” I remarked as a gray goose took a bite of down out of a fowl lower down the pecking order.
From the Minnewater it’s a hop and a jump to the Beguinage. The sense of peace and stillness there stays with me. Stark clean white-and-black buildings, the brilliantly green grass, the trees (all leaning slightly north) reaching way, way up. And everywhere little signs saying SHHHH which goes a long way towards explaining the sense of quiet…
Out again, coming across a walkway along the main canal, I began to follow it on a whim and followed it damn near halfway around the city! – I mean the “egg” of central Bruges. At some point I accidentally turned down along one of their canals and ended up back at the Markt.
Had a bite to eat there and later went in search of one of the beer cafés mentioned in Wikipedia, ’t Brugs Beertje. (Beer is bear. Ysbeer or ijsbeer – “ice-bear” – is polar bear.) Tried Stille Nacht while making small talk @ the bar with one of the locals. (Note: In Belgium – or @ least Bruges – bar staff serve you at your table, as in Canada – perhaps the practice of going up to the bar for everything is unique to Britain? Must investigate.)
By sheer chance I’d picked the beer with 12% alc. vol. & by the time I got home, tipsy, I fell straight asleep. Woke up early but decided for the first time in ages to sleep in the following day. If you can’t indulge yourself on Christmas holiday, when can you…?
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See the rest of my holiday photos.
Come for the rock, stay for the klezmer.
