You can thank my wife for the puny title above. She loves puns and is very clever in a play on words sort of way. She is much better than I am at coming up with catchy phrases.
Anyway, as you have certainly guessed by now, this post is about the city of Ghent Belgium.
Ghent is a fairly large city in Belgium that is located directly between Brussels and Bruges, about an hours drive away from either of them. We visited Ghent in February of last year and overall we were quite pleased with the experience, even despite the dreary overcast weather. My photos give a sort of dark and ominus look to it and almost make it seem like a forboding place. But really, Ghent is anything but foreboding.
We handn't heard much about Ghent prior to our visit but we were told by several people that Bruges was a town that you have to experience in the country. We were told that Bruges has a lot of canals and a quaint sort of charm that make it unlike any other place to go. We decided to save Bruges for a good weather time of year and chose to go to Ghent, almost as an after thought while passing through the area. At this point though we have been to both locations and both my wife and I agreed that we actually much preferred Ghent than Bruges.
We found that Ghent actually had more canals meandering through the city and a few less gift shops, which to us made it seem much less touristy than Bruges. When I think of it, everything that we were told about Bruges being quaint and charming we actually experienced more so in Ghent. But enough comparing the two cities.
Ghent has a large old town in the center of the city with several neat areas to experience throughout. These include a large square, a cathedral and even a medieval castle fortress complete with a moat directly in the heart of the town.
The building architecture in the old town has a distinclty Flemish look about it that also appears very gothic as well. Maybe it was just the dark skies that made it look that way to me but I happen to like gothic architecture so I wasn't complaining.
As far as food goes Ghent was a lot like the other cities in Belgium. There were a lot of shops in town selling chocolates and more than a few waffle stands. There were several restaurants in the main square as well, one of which we ate at. I meantioned in my last post that it was a historic butchers shop converted into a restaurant and there were hams hanging from the ceiling that were being cured. I would recommend it as a place to get lunch or at least to walk through on your journey through the old town.
One of the coolest things that we experienced in Ghent was in the main square in front of the old cathedral. There was a man there with a bucket of soapy water and a string making bubbles. They filled up the entire area and it was super cool despite it being so simple. Not surprisingly a ton of people gathered in the space to take pictures.
As mentioned previously, there was also a large castle right in the center of town. From the outside it was one of the more unique castles that we've seen in our travels.
I don't know the history of it though because we didn't go inside that day. It wasn't possible because we had the dog with us.
But we did spend some time walking around the moat and imagining what it was like inside behind the large stone walls that surrounded the fortress.
One last thing that I thought was cool was an alleyway that connected two parallel streets to each other. It was lined with graffiti which was a welcomed pop of color on such a dreary overcast day.
We really enjoyed Ghent and would recommend it as a place to visit in Belgium. My only regret was that we didn't save it for better weather to really enjoy the canals.