Tuesday March 18 - Bruges

We all took a train to the small town of Bruges today. Bruges is sort of like a smaller, much more quaint and beautiful version of Brussels, with tons of chocolate shops and little cafes. Here are our first couple views of Bruges – incredibly beautiful, calm scenes of little old houses and shops on the banks of the canals. Check it out (they're so beautiful - click to see them bigger):

Note the group of pretty swans in this one. I want to live here:

It also has its own really cool old plaza very much like that of Brussels, complete with humongous old buildings, clock tower, etc. See:

And here, the long-awaited photo of the ducklings! We referred to ourselves as the ducklings because we mindlessly followed the leader. And yes, we’re in numerical order and we’re flashing our numbers. It’s hard to understand how exciting it is that a stranger took this for us and managed to get all of us in it, all smiling, not blurry, with our numbers AND cool buildings in the plaza visible.

Then we went to the diamond museum of Bruges, where we learned pretty much everything about diamonds – their cut, color, clarity, carats, how to cut them, shape them, how long it takes to get various sizes of diamonds from their rough form all the way through the cutting and shaping processes. I had two favorite things in the museum.

1) This giant vat of synthetic diamonds. I really wanted to get in there and just wallow in the diamonds:

2) Boris, the only fully functioning speaking diamond robot in the world. Here’s the description of him, provided by the museum: Boris will grip a small container with graphite situated on a column on the right; he will then move it to his mouth and swallow it. While explaining his actions in Russian, he brings the pressure and temperature within his head to 1,400 degrees Celsius. After a few minutes of HTHP conditions Boris again will reduce pressure and temperature to atmospheric level, push the synthesis container out of his mouth with his tongue and bring back the container, now filled with fine synthetic diamonds, to the column.

The interior of Boris is highly complex with numerous hydraulic electric circuits, valves, electrical relays and automates. Basically, he’s a pretty big deal:

Next we went to the chocolate museum of Bruges, where you learn way too much history about chocolate and how to make chocolate, but at the end they do a demonstration and give all the visitors a little chocolate star, which is lovely. This is the only photo I took inside the museum.

Here’s a photo of the offerings of a chocolate shop. Keep in mind, they’re ALL like this: elaborately decorated eggs and bunnies, in yellow and pink chocolate (because milk and dark are so last year):

And this is my favorite street sign from Bruges. I'm not clear about what the message is, but it seems forceful: