Ghent Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Alright so I've been meaning to write this one for a while now, but you know midterms, excuses and so forth.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was out at a bar or school (I'm not sure which. are they not the same thing at this point? I'm kidding), when I realized I didn't have anything planned for the weekend. So I thought, hey I should go somewhere for the day on Saturday. I looked to my right and asked my friend Kyle if he wanted to go on a day trip.
"yeah", said he.
"Cool. let's go to Ghent", said Bo.
We both nod.

So that Saturday, we got up at a time before noon, hopped on a train and embarked on a romantic getaway to Ghent. Why Ghent? Well, having been for the LichtFestival, it seemed like a pretty cool city, but since I was only there for a few hours during the festival, I didn't get to see much of the actual city at all.



I am by no means an expert on the time period, but medieval would be an adequate description of Ghent as a city. The first thing you'll notice is that city is just swarmed with churches. Some big, some small, some old, some older, some green, some blue, and so on. THERE WERE A LOT OF CHURCHES. I didn't count, but if I had to approximate i'd say I saw 34 over the span of 7 hours.

Look at this place

Okay, so you get the picture, lots of churches. Now, some of these are the biggest attractions in Ghent. we started the day by walking to St. Pietersabdij, one of these churches, and explored the inside.

The place was massive

with a massive organ....

This was the only church we really explored the inside of during our visit. We did walk by and marvel at some of the other well known ones like Sintt-Niklaaskerk or Sint-Baafskathedraal, but we did not exactly feel like spending our day comparing the various discrepancies between churches.

Instead we did some other stuff. you may think these things were cool. I don't know, I'm not you.

First, we decided to check out the Design museum. I was not sure what a design museum is, but my guidebook said do it, so we did. It turns out that the design museum was in fact a museum dedicated to design? At least I think it was. I know nothing about design, and the majority of the museum space was taken up by a temporary exhibition on light, which was actually pretty cool.

The exhibit had a variety of different displays that were pretty unique in their own right. Some of my favorites included, a series of flickering candles that were actually just LED lights creating the mirage of a flickering candle:

Tricky lights, tricky.

There was also a purely white room with different colored lighting being shown on different areas of the room. I think it was made with the purpose of showing how light changes your perception of your surroundings or something philosophical like that. You also had to put these weird foot coverings on your shoes to enter. Take a look:

 

Since I'm sure you enjoyed looking at my feet for those few seconds, so heres a couch I found:

There were some other interesting light fixtures as well, including these light bulbs,

Such Bulb, much light

and this dark room with only a dash of natural light:

As for the design portion of the museum, there was a lot of unique furniture, most of which I did not understand. But there was a also this picture that I didn't quite understand:

Any guesses?

oh, and this table made of books?

So yeah, the design museum. Interesting, slightly perverted and possibly hallucinogenic but worth the 2 euro student price.

BEER TIME:

Stopping at a small restaurant for lunch, we were finally able to sample the local fare, which included a nice blond brew known as Petrus. It had a real nice citrus flavor that complemented my food nicely. It was by far my favor sample of the day.

From there, Kyle and I then stumbled upon a bar called Herberg Dulle Griet, and after noticing their selection of 250 different Belgian beers, we decided we needed to stop in for a post meal drink. Kyle tried the Augustijn blond, while I played my cards with the Gentse Tripel. 

Although the Gentse triple was not bad by any means, after tasting Augustijn, it was clear that Kyle had made the better choice. 

END OF BEER TIME.

So after a quick round, we were on the move again, and came across the legendary cannon of which the bar we just exited is named after. Behold, the Dulle Griet:

probably not what you expected

I don't claim to be a connosieur of cannons, as I have no idea how this thing ever worked, if it did. Out of curiousity, I did decide to explore it further:

The inside was pretty much just a collection of discarded chip bags and some Cara-Pils cans.

Continuing the mideival theme, the next stop of our day was the Gravensteen Castle, a real castle with moat and everything just plopped right in the middle of the city. 

We were able to explore much of the castle, from the cellar to top. The castle also serves a museum now, showing off a collection of mideival weaponry and armer

This sword is bigger than Kyle.

This killed people

A section of the museum was dedicated to torture as seen in mideival times.

This is the part where I make a 50 Shades of Grey joke

It also featured some information of life of the time, and how the castle functioned during its daily use back in the day:

Here's a diagram of how toilets worked 

And here's a toilet

The best part of the castle was by far the views of the thing as well as the surrounding city. Here's the view from the top:

And one from a lower section of the castle wall.

There was also apparently a wedding party taking photos at the castle as well, because nothing screams marriage like a long standing relic of a previous society whose morals were extremely different from ours today.

It felt good to be king.

King of the castle, king of the castle

From there, we journeyed around the city some more, exploring the various city squares that were bustling with people. We also stumbled across a group of football hooligans marching through the touristy streets while police shadowed. That was cool! One last thing we visited was a tiny alley way near the city center that is just covered in street art. It's not the Lennon Wall but it still featured some out there imagery. 

As the day winded down, we stopped in another bar called Het Spijker, which was in the basement of an older stone building, which created a real cool atmosphere. I tried the Keizer Karel Blond. 

To describe it, all i can really say is "meh". 

And so that was pretty much my trip to Ghent. We caught a train and were back to Brussels in 30 minutes. The train system make it incredibly easy to get around Belgium, and makes day trips like these an enjoyable and cheap way to travel while still spending the evenings in Brussels. Till next time. Cheers