Where Poppies Blow

For some reason the French are willing to let anyone into their county while the English make everyone go through an interrogation just to visit. Why is this?! We didn’t even have to get our passports out to cross the English Channel TO France, but coming home was a different story. It’s like that every time. Ah, well. Next time I need to worry about my passport will be on my flight back to the states anyway!

We crossed the English Channel via Ferry. Our bus just drove straight onto the ferry, we waited 2 hours, and we were in a different country! (I actually don’t know WHICH county it was, because we immediately kept driving for 2 hours.. All I know is that we eventually got out in Belgium.)

Funny side note: Remember my trip to Dover awhile back when we didn’t get to see the castle because we got the time wrong? Well, the Ferry left from Dover again. Turns out our 9:40 Ferry was cancelled and we had to wait until 10:40. Dover just isn’t our place apparently.

We got to Brugge, Belgium about mid-afternoon and had the day to explore. Brugge is absolutely adorable! It is a classic little Belgium town with the cute stepped-roof houses along every street and courtyards with cobblestone and horse pulled wagons everywhere. Lining every street are DOZENS of little chocolate shops selling the most beautiful chocolates in the world! Seriously – chocolate is a form of art. I never knew you could do so many different things with it. Needless to say, we all immediately fell in love.

We did a boat tour through the town first and where able to enjoy the town’s charm while floating down the town’s river/canal. Then we ate at the cutest restaurant, stopped to buy souvenirs (aka - Belgium Chocolate). The next morning we went to a chocolate museum first thing in the morning. Everything in the museum is made of chocolate and you just walk around licking the walls. It sounds disgusting, but the taste is so good you don’t mind swapping a few germs.

Okay, that was a lie. The museum just told the history of chocolate basically. Did you know the cocoa bean used to be a form of currency? I decided that in my quest to create a world-wide currency I’m going to take that up again. Apparently it only cost 10 cocoa beans for a dead rabbit. That sold me. I love dead rabbits.

After a delicious lunch of Belgium waffles (Sweet, right?) and an enjoyable afternoon in a Brugge square, we headed to Leper for the In Flanders Fields Museum. I was super excited for this because the song In Flanders Fields was a very special one to me as I sung it through high school with my choirs. It definitely lived up to my expectations. The museum took you through WWI and everything that happened to the soldiers. I felt such a reverence and was moved to tears multiple times. The most touching story was about the Christmas Truce. I’d heard the story before, but it was so different reading about it there. I read pages of accounts from soldiers about how both sides ceased fire for Christmas and joined together as brothers to celebrate. The poem In Flanders Fields was displayed in the middle of the museum. While the poem has always meant so much to me because of the song, I have  complete new respect for it now. The men that fought in those poppy fields were sacrificing so much and went through amazingly terrible things.

The rest of the trip was centered on WWI. We stayed in the French town Amiens Tuesday night and on Wednesday went to a battlefield where actual fighting took place. The trenches have been preserved so that we could see both sides lines as well as no-man’s land. Our guide spent about an hour and a half walking around with us and explaining what the soldiers would have been going through.

The trip was full of fun as well as reverence. While Brugge was pure enjoyment, Amiens and Leper taught me a lot about the First World War and what went on. It’s impossible to choose just one, but easily this trip was one of my all time favorites. 

 Standing on a Brugge bridge! The canal behind me is the one we went boating down.

 The stepped-roof houses were the cutest things.. I honestly felt like they too cute to be real. We could have been standing in a studio surrounded by perfectly painted backdrops.

 This was one of the town-squares that we spent a lot of our time in. 

 Chocolate Museum!

 Here's the square from a different angle... I guess I really liked this square. Another thing I loved about it was that there were hardly any cars anywhere. Everyone rode bikes or just walked.

I know this doesn't show you at all what the museum was actually like. Proof I was there maybe?

 These are the trenches from WWI that are still at the site today. In some parts you couldn't even see over the top they were so tall. 

 Our guide explained to us that each soldier's stone was exactly the same size no matter what rank, nationality, or name he had. There were also some tombs with 2 soldier's names on them because they had died so close to each other they had to be buried together. 

 Just to the right of the flag is a little piece of metal. That's a piece of shell that is still in the field. There are still tons of shrapnel and shells that never went off buried out in the trenches and fields. 

Everything about the museum just amazed me. What they went through, the fact that they dug the trenches, how they fought, how they died, and then how they are honored. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to visit battlefields and museums where I could develop a greater appreciation for WWI and the soldiers that fought through it.