Phase 2 - Ghent, Belgium!
After 3 nice days in London we headed over to Ghent, Belgium via trains. Thank goodness for the invention of suitcases with wheels! We fell in love with this beautiful city automatically!
If you look on the left you'll see our Marriott hotel. It was the best location ever!
Here is the other side of the canal outside our hotel. It was a big hang out spot.
A few blocks away was this cool medieval castle where the town ruler used to keep the local residents in check. I swear every room was used as a torture chamber! Makes me glad to live in modern times!
I loved the castle doors.
Me checking out the kingdom from the top.
Brian climbing the crazy stairs to the top.
This sign was like most in the house - oh, you know - a place to store horses, stuff, oh, and to torture people. They even had a hole in the middle of one room that they would drop people down into a whole other deep, dark room and left them there until they froze to death. Let's not even discuss the room of medieval torturing devices! Creepy!
But enough about torture - here are more pics of town. I could honestly fill a zillion blogs with cool pictures of this town. It had over 300 cafes, cobblestones everywhere, and street after street of beautiful buildings and churches.
We took a boat tour on the canal,
Watched a group of student canoers,
and ate LOTS of brodje sandwhiches (basically french bread with sliced egg, shredded carrots, greens, cheese, and whatever meat/filling you want) Subway with style :)
We also bought and ate obscene amounts of chocolate,
and visited the town's 3 beautiful churches
And we admired all the bikes. Here is about 10% of the bikes we saw at the commuter lot at the train station! It was so fun to see people riding around town everywhere in high heels, skirts or whatever!
I especially loved the mommy bikes like this one that opens up to put your kids and bags. Isn't that the coolest?
Ghent was our favorite city by far. The bigger cities are cool, but this college town with 250,000 people was just right.
One of my favorite days of the whole trip was the day I slept in until 10 am, and roamed the city alone (while Brian was at his conference and my parents were doing their own thing). I did what I wanted, when I wanted! I real luxery for me! I shopped, ate chocolate, shopped more, looked at churches, ate, and shopped again. I will admit that by dinner time I had my fill and was a tad bored so I met up with my parents for a nice Flemish dinner. It was so refreshing seeing another culture and their way of doing things and to be surrounded by non-english speaking people! I love Ghent!
Comments