M: Breakfast in Bruges has been surprisingly hard to find. We walked around what felt like the entire city in search of a reasonably-priced café. Eventually we found a spot and I tried some delicious rhubarb lemonade.

There is a regular market on Saturdays (not Christmas related) that we wanted to visit nearby. The square was cute but the market turned out to be disappointing. We had been promised fresh produce and live animals down at the end, but alas there was very few of one and none of the other.

The morning was anything but lost though as we went to Olivier’s chocolate! We perused the chocolate selection and assembled our bag of goodies for the afternoon’s festivities. It is always a good idea to get one or two of the chocolatier behind the counter’s favourite, and this time was no exception. She said her favourite was the cookie crumble praline, and she was right! It was delicious.

S: We went back to the hostel to have a super fun laundry day. We blasted Taylor Swift’s new song, cleaned, folded and organized all while singing at horrible pitches. A few repeated listenings and we’ve got the lyrics down pat! The truest of Taylor fans.

Still humming tswift we got totally turned around in the streets looking for dinner. We settled for carbonnade with salad and fries, a local dish that was definitely at comfort food level. The waitress watched us eat the entire time from the back corner of the restaurant, which left us in quiet stitches at our table.

M: The ladies from last night – Simona, Jetty, Sofie and Antonela – were hanging out at the bar playing jenga. We gladly joined in on what turned into a very competitive game and we were surprisingly not the worst! (S: Hey now.) Team Holland fared by far the worst, with Jetty and Sofie buying a few rounds as a result. We had a hoot playing 21, too. This time resulted in one of my favourite new rules: making an enthusiastic turkey-like hlulhlulhlul sound before you drink a mandated drink. And none of us half-assed this. It was a full on, enthusiastic hlulhlulhlul every. Single. Time. The six of us were laughing for almost literally the entire night.

S&M