Christmas in Bruges!

At the start of December, we jetted off to Brussels for a weekend of festive fun. We stayed there from a Thursday night to a Sunday morning and did every possible touristy thing we could, including their very large Christmas market. While we enjoyed that, we both felt the day we spent in Medieval Bruges (only an hour by train from Brussels) was, although smaller, more special and more atmospheric. 

The Christmas market by night

The town is only a short stroll from the train station and although you can hire a horse and cart, it's an absolutely beautiful place to walk around. In fact, I think the word picturesque may well have been coined with Bruges in mind. 

Pretty idyllic, eh? The streets themselves are suitably old-school and a joy to walk through. All of the chocolate shops in Belgium seem to be located right here and yes, we did buy much chocolate-y treats. 

By the time we'd walked through the streets of Bruges and got to the main square where the market was on, the sun was about to set and it looked even more Disney-esque than before:

There was also a relatively small ice-skating rink, which we didn't partake in cause I'm clumsy AF and manage to injure myself in my sleep, so instead we got alcoholic hot beverages and watched others enjoy the winter wonderland-ness of it all:

And of course, it's beautiful by nighttime:

Above is the tower featured in the Colin Farrell movie, In Bruges, that (SPOILER-the film is really old so it's your own fault if you haven't seen it and this spoils it for you) Brendan Gleeson falls to his death from. Again, SPOILER. 

You can pay to go to the top but it involves many steep and windy stairs, so we gave it a miss.

There's lots of arts and crafts, gifts, knitted hats and scarves, Christmas tree decorations etc to buy but personally I'm all about the gluhwein, hotdogs, frites and churros and they were there in abundance. 

The Bruges Christmas market is running until the 1st of January this year, if you've any days free between now and then and are super keen to go travelling!

Have you been to Bruges? 

Is it on your travel hit-list?

To the comments!

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