After Brussels, I took a much needed break from chocolate and went to Bruges - to watch some candy making in action!  Bruges is a beautiful city, full of canals and horse carriages, expensive restaurants and shopping Brits.  I struggled with the prices there, and couldn’t afford to stay for long (dinner didn’t get much cheaper than 10 euros.)  Still, it was nice to be there after Brussels!

I arrived on a crowded Saturday afternoon.  My first concern was finding a hostel - almost everywhere was fully booked, and the streets were teeming with British tourists taking weekend trips.  One of the risks I take while traveling is just showing up in a city without reservations.  Usually, this backfires and I end up at the first hostel I find (sometimes as the only person there, which is never fun) and other times all the good hostels are full so I end up paying extra for a cheap hotel, or staying in a not-so-clean hostel.  The advantage, of course, is that I can decide every morning what I want to do that day - flexibility that can be well worth it, and was actually the only reason I ended up ın Bruges at all, as it wasn’t part of my original itinerary.

Fortunately, in Bruges I got lucky and found the last open bed in a clean, centrally located hostel - a hostel with an included restaurant that served delicious Belgium style food - while I probably should have gotten the famous oysters, a thick, homey chicken stew sounded more appetizing.  And, it came with a free beer!

However, I didn’t come to Bruges to eat stew.  Instead, I had heard of a candy store that does candy-makıng demonstrations - obviously right up my alley.  While the people manning the store weren’t the most friendly candy-makers in business, it was fascinating to watch them work with the quickly cooling boiled sugar. It couldn’t remaim still or it would harden, so their was constant movement - whipping the undyed portion around a metal hook to tutn it a bright white, shaping what would become the individual sections of an orange, and pulling the large column into a thin wire which cooled and was broken into pieces.  And of course… free samples!  The hard candy is sweet and tart with strong flavors of the underlying fruit.  I chose to buy a small bag of mango sweets - yum!

I took a number of pictures, which are linked on my flickr page if you would like to see the whole process.  I had no idea how much ‘muscle’ went into handmaking the little rolls and lollıpops of boiled candy - maybe in Australia I can learn a bit how to do it!

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Congratulations to Alex for winning the contest last week!  I am planning a new one that everyone will be able to participate in, so stay tuned.  I’m in Turkey now… still applying to law schools and also eating LOTs of baklava and Turkish delight.  I won’t be doing much touristy there, but if you want to see that side of Turkey, take a look at the blog I kept last time I was there.  I think Kate and I pretty much had the perfect itinerary, as on my return I can’t think of much else to do!