Travel another way

I am running a plein air painting tour in Belgium with one art teacher, Sandy Delehanty, and 7 students: Bonnie, Catherine, Teresa, Linda, Margaret, Bill and Sylvia.

Today, I have decided to post the travel notes from the art teacher:

“My students and I are on a Watercolor Workshop planned and guided by French Escapade, a company that specializes in small group tours for people who want to really immerse themselves in the culture of the country they are visiting. Scroll down to my previous post to see the lovely country hotel where we are staying and you will get the idea that this is not your typical “if this is Tuesday it must be Belgium tour”.

There is so much to see in Brugges Belguim that we decided to spend our first day exploring, photographing and soaking up the ambience in this beautiful city, “The Venice of the North”.

The only Michaelangelo statue outside of Italy is here in Brugge. It was commissioned by Sienna, but the people from Brugge paid a higher price, so it came to live Brugge.

Margaret with her lace fan she purchased from a young lace maker who showed us how she creates lace from 72 bobbins. The craft is passed down through the generations, but today’s lace shops sell mostly machine made lace to keep the price reasonable for purchase. The young lady had some small doilies for sale that took her 8 hours to make, but because they were small she had to price them at only 8 euros.

Bonnie and Catherine after our boat tour, it is very sunny today.

A painting everywhere I look. Scenes like this drew us to Belgium for our Watercolor Workshop. Our guide Jackie is from Belgium so we are getting the inside scoop on life in Belgium ” (from Sandy’s blog at http://havepaintswilltravel.blogspot.com/).