Minnewater

Aren’t you a bit fed up with elections? Election of the sportsman of the year, the businessman of the year, the best pun of the year, the best....Now we are having elections for the City of Bruges Personality of the year 2006. Five top candidates remain on the list : Jan Darthet, the city’s official photographer; Geert Van Hecke, owner of the restaurant De Karmeliet (the Carmelite); Raymond Van het Groenenwoud, the singer, Luc Can Lierde the triathlon athlete who twice won the Iron Man; and, last but not least, baron Polydor. While the other four gentlemen are not losing a wink of sleep worrying whether they will have the title or not, this "baron Polydor van ‘t Smouthuus" (baron Polydor of the LardHouse) is extremely busy doing the rounds of the city trying to hustle votes for himself. So, your guess is as good as mine as to whom will be Bruges City Personality 2006...

Bruges has always had a number of special, even eccentric, but certainly popular characters, people who really were different. Did you ever hear of Vincent De Groof? No? Well, he was a true Bruges citizen. He died on July 9, 1874, in London, England, and thousands of Londoners who had paid good money - not to see Vincent die, of course, but to see him FLY.- were witness to his unfortunate demise. How did it happen? Well, Vincent De Groof, who was a plasterer and ornament modeler by trade, had engineered a machine which would allow him - so he said - to fly. At the end of the month of June of that year, he made his first trial-flight. He had his plane attached to a balloon and up he went. There was a good wind and the balloon floated quite a distance away from London. Once Vincent deemed he had reached a desirable height, he uncoupled his plane from the balloon and, as the eyewitnesses reported, he apparently did fly for about half an hour. Whether that is true or not can probably be researched but, the news spread like a brush fire and when Vincent’s second attempt was announced, thousands of Londoners had trooped to the Cremorne Gardens, where De Groof would repeat his stunt. And so it happened. When balloon and "plane" were about 5000 feet high, Vincent cut his machine loose from the balloon and... plunged straight down and crashed under the eyes of thousands of Londoners.

"Thousand of eyes, fixed upon that single object suddenly saw this huge bird, which had been loosened from the balloon, fall forward, turn upside down and fall to the ground in a bloody and unrecognizable heap."

Later, De Gazet van Brugge (The Gazette of Bruges) wrote this about the incident : "Poor devil. He never knew glory, but he had that faith and belief which moves mountains, and the miracle which he dreamed of and tried to bring about, is now in the making.’

Here is a foretaste of the "hidden treasures of Bruges" which I discovered today. This here is the cupola, inside the English convent. I can assure you, I had never seen it. Magnificent, as were the clear, brilliant colours everywhere in that convent. And "colour" was precisely the theme chosen for this year's Heritage Day. And just as magnificent and colourful was the hospitality of the nuns. Even though there were many people, and the place as busy as a beehive, the nuns remained smiling and ever ready to give yet additional explanations. I heard a conversation between a nun and neighbouring people, living in the same street, the Carmers street. The nun had never set foot outside the convent, had never been out in that street... I heard English visitors having a conversation in English with another nun. In between, I could hear two guides rambling off background history about the convent. Had it not been for all the other interesting places I did not want to miss on this day, I would gladly have spent the whole afternoon in that English convent. Fortunately, I managed to take quite a few photos. I do hope you like them.