Bruges,
Our midday arrival at the Belgian port of Ostende was preceded by an eerie morning's sail through English Channel fog that reminded us of that infamous headline in the London Times, "Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off!" We sounded the foghorn regularly at the pilot station and watched with some surprise as a sizeable launch approached the ship from the stern and lowered the small pilot boat into the water to transfer the pilot to our ship. It was only when the breakwaters at the harbor entrance came into view an hour later that we could be sure that we had finally arrived.
In the course of the short drive from Ostende to Bruges, the skies cleared and an afternoon of brilliant sunshine lit this gem of a mediaeval city to perfection. In the Middle Ages, Bruges was a wealthy port at the heart of the European cloth trade importing cloth from the monastic estates of Britain and distributing finished textiles to trading centers in northern Europe. This was the staple trade of the age, the word staple originally referring to a length of sheep's wool. Bruges grew fabulously wealthy on the cloth trade and it is the city's riches in mediaeval art and architecture that attract today's tourists in such large numbers. We were able to appreciate the gabled facades of the buildings on a tour by boat of the city's narrow canals. Elaborate frontage decoration was a sign of status as one generation of merchants succeeded another. The city's series of splendid churches contain some of the principal treasures of European art: we marveled at the beauty of the Madonna and Child by Michelangelo in the church of Notre Dame. The town hall with its tall belfry spoke volumes for the city's commercial confidence. William Caxton printed the first English-language book here in 1485 when the river approach to the city was already silting up. By the seventeenth century that process was well advanced and Bruges ceased to function as a commercial port. The happy consequence of this was that a fine mediaeval city, sometimes referred to a "the Venice of the north", has been bequeathed to posterity.
Our midday arrival at the Belgian port of Ostende was preceded by an eerie morning's sail through English Channel fog that reminded us of that infamous headline in the London Times, "Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off!" We sounded the foghorn regularly at the pilot station and watched with some surprise as a sizeable launch approached the ship from the stern and lowered the small pilot boat into the water to transfer the pilot to our ship. It was only when the breakwaters at the harbor entrance came into view an hour later that we could be sure that we had finally arrived.
In the course of the short drive from Ostende to Bruges, the skies cleared and an afternoon of brilliant sunshine lit this gem of a mediaeval city to perfection. In the Middle Ages, Bruges was a wealthy port at the heart of the European cloth trade importing cloth from the monastic estates of Britain and distributing finished textiles to trading centers in northern Europe. This was the staple trade of the age, the word staple originally referring to a length of sheep's wool. Bruges grew fabulously wealthy on the cloth trade and it is the city's riches in mediaeval art and architecture that attract today's tourists in such large numbers. We were able to appreciate the gabled facades of the buildings on a tour by boat of the city's narrow canals. Elaborate frontage decoration was a sign of status as one generation of merchants succeeded another. The city's series of splendid churches contain some of the principal treasures of European art: we marveled at the beauty of the Madonna and Child by Michelangelo in the church of Notre Dame. The town hall with its tall belfry spoke volumes for the city's commercial confidence. William Caxton printed the first English-language book here in 1485 when the river approach to the city was already silting up. By the seventeenth century that process was well advanced and Bruges ceased to function as a commercial port. The happy consequence of this was that a fine mediaeval city, sometimes referred to a "the Venice of the north", has been bequeathed to posterity.
