Whilst I was in the shower the water went off, I was still covered in shower gel, I managed to fill the basin about 1/4 full of cold water & used a flannel to wash off the shower gel, not very pleasant. As I was telling Richard what had happened our host sent an email to say there was a problem with the water, Richard had heard people on the stairs, our current apartment is a warehouse conversion & the host lives upstairs, there was also a workers van outside so not sure if he was having work done & had forgotten it would affect us, or he felt letting us know when something happened was ok.
After I was dressed we headed to the station to catch the train to Brugge, a 14 min journey.
We still needed to sort out the cancelled bus & I thought there was a flixbus shop in Brugge just outside the station. No luck finding the shop I again tried my phone, no luck there either although I now thought it was a my phone issue rather than the number. We went into tourist information at the station & they gave us directions to a shop, connections, who could assist. It wasn’t open, we then worked out it must be Donderdag today meaning they didn’t open until 12 noon. We headed to a cafe & had a great coffee & went back. Unfortunately they couldn’t assist as they hadn’t made the booking for us but they also gave me another couple of telephone numbers to try. We then headed into the main market square & to the wall of beer & then along one of the canals heading towards the four windmills & one of the four remaining city gates, although no walls now stand. The city is surrounded almost entirely by water & is so pretty.

We then headed to the Lace Centre, the ground floor houses the lace Museum & a shop where patterns & supplies are available. There was a great film about the Brugge lace trade, there used to be schools that taught the art of lace making. Beautiful pieces of lace on display & a couple of samples books, as learning a pattern was time consuming & involved a loss of income, each sample was made by a different woman & if chosen that order would go to the women who made the sample. Upstairs was a demonstration, it was like a chat & sew, a room of eight women who were making lace & chatting, the patterns are quite intricate & they had so many bobbins, so clever. We then headed back into the main town & found somewhere for lunch. We both chose the Flemish beef stew & decided on the three course lunch as that was only €3 more, I had cheese croquettes for entree & Richard the Arden ham & dessert was ice cream with cream & chocolate sauce. Whilst we were having lunch there was a heavy rain shower. It had stopped raining by the time we left the restaurant to head further along the canal, we stopped in at the brewery & Richard had a beer, we were sat in the courtyard of the brewery luckily under cover as it started raining again, we continued onto the train station past the lake & an arched bridge, even in the rain Brugge was very pretty.
We caught the train just after 5pm.
I checked my Telstra app & everything seemed to be set up OK & I’d turned my phone off & on a few times but still couldn’t ring out or use my roaming data. We eventually got onto Telstra chat & onto a real person but all they could do was confirm everything was set up OK & that Base was the correct service provider. We were able to ring out on Richards mobile & will receive a full refund for the bus tickets & have now booked the train, so annoying. Before bed I switched my phone off & left it off all night.