Bascilica of the Holy Blood

OK, more Bruges (with more to come). One of my favorite spots was the Basilica of the Holy Blood (Basiliek van het Heilig-Bloed) which is located in the Burg (one of the two fraternal twin squares, along with the Markt, at the heart of Bruges - the Markt is much bigger but I think I actually like the Burg better). It took a little effort to finally get in here. My first attempt at a visit was during morning mass (I was in Burges on Sunday 4 July) so I decided to return - and when I returned it was closed for a midday break. As with most things, ice cream was the answer, and after a break I returned at 2:00, and was really glad I did. Not only is it a lovely Romanesque church with a touch of Gothic thrown in, but it's also famous, as the name would suggest, for a very famous holy relic - a fragment of cloth, embedded in a rock-crystal vial inside a glass cylinder, that is supposed to be stained with the blood of Jesus - wiped from the body after the crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea. Yes, and I know that there are enough piedes of the "true cross" floating around to construct the "true Ark," but I find these things cool and meaningful nevertheless. What really pushed this over the top was that it was out on display today. It was behind an altar, and you could walk up, leave a donation, touch the vial, and meditate - many people actually kissed it. I paid my 2 euro, laid my hands on it for a couple moments, closed my eyes and meditated - don't know if I found God or reached an existential epiphany, but it was a unique experience that I would have kicked myself for not doing it. Anyway, the older I get I increasingly have deeply moving experiences in churches, so maybe I am moving towards some greater spiritual awakening. The bottom picture, from a respectful distance, is of the area where you could touch the holy relic.

Biking to the Islands

The last couple years I've become a very enthusiastic bike rider (I guess it's the Vermonter in me coming out, much to my horror). Burlington has a ton of great bike trails, not all of which contain fragments of my teeth embedded in them. I've fallen into a pattern of, weather permitting, biking around fifteen or twenty miles a day, which, as long as it's flat (and this little corner of generally hilly/mountainous VT is) isn't really that far on a bike. In August (and now, happily, July and August) there is a bike ferry that connects a gap in the causeway, which allows you to make it all the way up to the Lake Champlain islands, which then give you many more options for biking. The islands themselves are very interesting - very flat and agricultural, with lots of little interesting places to stop for crafts or snacking. One of my favorite places is a combination of gift shop/coffee shop/pizzeria/post office up on North Hero Island called Hero's Welcome, which I've driven to many times (and which, insh'allah, I'll eventually bike to). The causeway stretches out from Colchester out into the lake itself, naturally enough, so you ride for a long time on this sandy path, surrounded by lake on both sides - the views are spectacular, although you can't get too caught up in the scenery for fear of riding off into the water. There is a break in the causeway which I suspect is probably thirty or forty yards, to allow for water vessel passage. During weekends in July and August you can, for $10, jump on on the bike ferry to take you to the other side of the causeway. From there you can ride up to South Hero Island, and then on to the other islands from there. I had always heard about it, but never actually made the trip until last August when I went with my friend Trish (who is a complete fitness nut who cycled me into the ground). The only thing you have to be careful about is making sure that you don't miss the last trip of the day, which, as long as the weather holds out, is 6:00 p.m. - if you miss it, then you're stuck on one side or the other, neither of the options are particularly horrible, obviously. The thing I had not considered until last weekend was what would happen if the ferry had to shut down mid-day because of bad weather, but, again, if your two choices are staying on either the Burlington or South Hero side, this is not a Scylla/Charybdis choice. I was supposed to meet my friends Mike and Andy around 9:30 down by the lakefront in Burlington (the ferry starts at 10:00 a.m., and we had to take the bike path up to Colchester), but I ended up getting there late because of a series of goofy misadventures (I was going to take my friend Bill's girlfreind Annie along, but we had to abandon the plan when we couldn't get air into her tires because the valve was too sophisticated for the air pump at the gas station - all I managed to do was actually let all the air out of her tires, and I'm sure we can learn something about general uselessness from this story). Anyway, I was late, and Mike and Andy, like the good souls they are, were patiently waiting for me. When I arrived I discovered that Andy only had $5 on him and they were planning on biking back up the hill to to go to an ATM. Since I had stopped along the way already at my bank to pick up some money I volunteered to pay for his trip on the bike ferry, to which Andy agreeded, and then pointed out that I also needed to buy him some food along the way (since he's only a couple years older than my son I guess we've developed the same sort of relationship). In one of the pictures we've stopped and are paying for the bike ferry - and we discovered that, even out on the tip of the causeway, they took plastic, which led Mike to suggest that since I would be paying cash for Andy's food later on, that Andy might use his card to pay for my bike ferry ride, which Andy viewed as very faulty logic, and, in defense of the purity of philosophy, declined to pay (but did so in such a charming way that we forgave him, and, of course, made sure he had plenty to eat later). I'm including a ton of pictures, but it was a beautiful day. We made a couple stops, one of them at a farm stand along the way, which included a place to get hamburgers/hotdogs, creemees and see some animals - and one of the animals came to see us. In one of the pictures you can actually almost hear Andy saying "dude, this fudge is max delicious." The round trip ended up being around forty miles, although we stopped before we made it to North Hero and the mythical Hero's Welcome (which, I'm guessing, would have added another ten miles or so to the journey). I was hoping to make the trip again this weekend, but everybody is out of town, and I couldn't quite rally myself to make the trip by myself (although I'm ending up biking about twenty miles a day both days anyway). Maybe next weekend.

Canals of Bruges

In Bruges

I really need to devote several postings to Bruges, which was every bit as amazing as I had been led to believe that it would be. Anyone who has seen the film In Bruges will have some sense of what a magical place it is. It ended up being one of those little side trips that makes the entire trip wonderful (although I loved Brussels itself, and have more to say about my time spent there as well). To start off, it is ridiculously easy to get to from Brussels - a train runs from the Central Station every half-hour all day long, and it ended up only costing me around 14 euro for the round-trip, although I went on a Sunday and that made it a little cheaper. As is seemingly my wont, I ended up going there on the 4th of July, and I may now start planning annual trips to foreign sites for every 4th of July - they always turn out well, and it probably adds to my ex-pat resume. I'll add a lot more text when I post on the central squares, the cathedrals, the canals, and the belfry. At this point I just want to post some pictures to give some sense of my initial emotional responses to Bruges. I spent the entire day walking around, stopping only a couple times for snack breaks, and just fell in love with the place - and can't wait to go back. It was crowded (as you can tell from the first picture - I had to stand in the compartment between the cars, and I got an early start, although, to be fair, it was a Sunday) but not uncomfortably so, and very touristy but even that had a quirky feel (note the museums dedicated to chocolate and Belgian fries, respectively). Much more in a few days.

A Very Vermonty Weekend

Last weekend I had one of those weekends that was so ridiculously Vermonty that I should have just started running tours of traditional Burlington establishments. It started on Friday night when my friend Cinse and I went to the late showing of Inception at the Roxy, which is a great little cinema that specializes in foreign and independent films (and the occasional Hollywood blockbuster, although even those are fairly selective). Now, catching the late show meant that I had to "suffer" through one of the definite problems of living in Burlington - the lack of a first-rate public transportation system. All the buses had long since stopped running for the evening so I had to make the half-hour plus walk from downtown over to Winooski where I live. On Saturday morning I rode my bike back to downtown and met Cinse at Penny Cluse, a restaurant that I had sworn off for the better part of a decade until my friend Trish cajoled me into trying it again last summer. It was one of the first place that I ate in Burlington, and, fresh from the sunny south, I wasn't ready for Vermont food yet. I ordered biscuits and gravy, and the gravy was herb gravy, which led me to tell the waiter "I think you're trying too hard - you can make this with pork products and it is delicious." So, I went on a nine year food strike before trying it again, and, I have to admit, it was very good - so I was happy to meet Cinse for breakfast there last week. After that we walked over to the farmers market that always runs on Saturday morning, and I'll include several pictures, most of which relate to Cinse searching for pennies to buy ever more products. Then I jumped back on my bike and went for a twenty mile ride up on the bike path to Colchester (I was getting prepped for the really big ride this weekend up to the Champlain Islands - more on that later). I'm including a picture of the area on the Colchester bike path where I had my spectacular crash last year and wrapped my face around the metal railing, leaving me with broken teeth and a face full of stitches. When I finally made it back I cleaned up and then walked up the hill to meet my friend Mike at a Vermont Lake Monsters baseball game (more on that later). On Sunday I went for another long bike ride, and then met Cinse downtown for vegan cupcakes and iced mochas, first at Uncommon Ground and then at Muddy Waters. There, for a person who is not very Vermonty, that was a remarkably Vermonty weekend. Oh, and I included a picture of the famous Samosa Man, not only because he has great samosas but also because my son worked for him one summer.