If It's Thursday, This Must Be Belgium

Ghent, Belgium

Thursday morning was still windy, but it wasn't raining. Since we didn't have far to go to get to Belgium from the Netherlands, we took our time with breakfast, and I finished up the last blog entry.

A Swan Family in Delft

As we walked to the train station, we came across this family of swans, watching them for a few minutes as Kathy took a video for Facebook. When we got to the station, our train was just about to leave, so we hurried down to the tracks; or, tried to.

There are no human ticket agents in Delft, so you have to buy the tickets from a machine (thankfully, with an English interface). We bought the tickets the night before. The first time through all of the options, I was too slow getting out my credit card, and so the machine reset back to the beginning. The second time through, I was ready, but accidentally forgot to reset the date, so I had purchased tickets for the sixth, instead of the seventh of June.

The information booth attendant told us we would have to try and get them changed in Rotterdam, and he opened the gate for us. When we got to Rotterdam, the attendants who let us out of the gates (since our tickets wouldn't work), told us we were out of luck, and that we'd have to buy new tickets (at 75 euro). Fortunately, when we got to the ticket counter, the lady there was able to tell that we hadn't used the tickets, and she issued us new ones.

Our train from Rotterdam to Ghent took about two hours. At the train station, we found a human and bought the rest of our train tickets. No more machines for me. We then picked up some tram tickets and had a quick and tasty takeout falafel/doner lunch right at the station.

By 2:00 PM we had made our way to our hotel. We are staying at a little 4-room hotel named Chambreplus right in the old city center. Our room is the Congo room (The Congo was a Belgium colony).

Graffiti Street in Ghent

Our Rick Steves guidebook has a two-hour walking tour of Ghent, so after we dropped off our luggage we took off. Most of the city is fairly graffiti-free, except for this little alley around the corner from our hotel. The city has designated this street as a legal graffiti zone and it's become quite a tourist attraction. The only real problem is that those talented artists always seem to have their work defaced by the talentless, so it does seem to be a little bit of a mess.

Lily in the Garden

 Right at the end of Graffitistaat there is a quiet, fenced in public garden, owned by the city. It was deserted, so we sat down there for a rest, and Kathy took this picture of a water lily.

Fishmarket Gate

We followed the tour for longer than two hours, and saw some impressive architecture and cute canals. Halfway through we stopped for some Liege sugar-waffles with strawberries and whipped-cream. That kind of killed our appetite, so when we were finished walking, we found the Souplounge, next to a pretty canal, that offers four daily soups, bread and a piece of fruit for 6 Euro.

Breakfast at Huize Colette

Unlike most of the places we've stayed, our hotel didn't offer breakfast. All of the restaurants in our guidebook were for lunch or dinner. In our room, though, was a list of local breakfast restaurants, so when we got up in the morning, we looked for the first one. The food was great.

The Ghent Altarpiece

After breakfast, we went to St. Bavo's Cathedral to see Ghent's premier attraction, the Ghent Altarpiece of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. It lived up to its billing. This is one of the most stolen works of art in history. It was stolen by Napoleon and put in the Louvre. It was stolen by the Kaiser, and its return was part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. The lower left panel was stolen again by a German who felt that it should have stayed in Germany (and never recovered). The remaining panels were stolen by the Nazis in WWII and only recovered by George Clooney and the Monuments Men at the end of the War.

After the Cathedral, we took a canal boat ride, something we almost never do. It was fun. After a nice lunch, we walked around the town some more.

City Market Hall and Belfry

This is the new City Market Hall and the old Bell Tower. In several different guidebooks and online articles, the authors raved about the new, forward-looking design of the new Market Hall. Both Kathy and I were unimpressed. Kathy said it looked like the goat barn I had built when we were in Shiloh.

Castle of the Counts, Ghent

This is the Castle of the Counts, the home of the ruling French aristocracy, and designed to protect them from the people of Ghent. This view is from the canal boat ride.

Castle of the Counts

Here's the land-side view, right around the corner from our hotel. Our guidebook gave it a lukewarm rating, so we didn't pay to visit the inside. After walking around, we went back to the hotel and took a nap. Around 6:30, we headed out again for "dinner," more Liege waffles, this time with ice cream. Afterwards, we left the guidebook behind and just wandered through the streets of the old medieval city. Tomorrow, we're expecting rain again as we head for Bruges.