Ghent Gone Again

Let's see... what's happened since my last post? Well, I met my colleague Jennifer for dinner and drinks in the Sablon, the most overtly French part of Brussels that I've found so far. Along the way, I encountered a large group of monks, including one who was carrying a ventriloquist's doll on his arm. I didn't ask.

The next evening was our other colleague Tina's birthday, so after work Friday we went out for drinks across the street, and had some dinner. We later decided to move to the city centre so some others could join us, and as seven of us were about to enter the Montgomery metro station near our office, we heard tires squealing. I turned to see an automobile bounce off a curb at the corner nearest to us, swerve toward the tram tracks, swerve back toward a grassy island in the middle of the road, jump the curb there, and plow right into a tree. The tree got the better of the collision, I assure you. The driver appeared to be alright, and one of our group called an ambulance to check him out. Saved by an airbag, though he did appear to have a cut on his forehead, and his windshield was a bit cracked, too. Regrettably, I didn't have my camera with me.

We took the train downtown, and as Thorsten (Tina's husband) and Anya (WSJ colleague) and I were walking and discussing the merits of deep-fried ice cream, I opined that anything deep-fried tasted good, and offered a "snotball" as an example. A man walking next to us, who I was later told was Flemish, started asking us what a "snotball" was, wanting to know if it was distinctly American cuisine. I was laughing too hard to explain, and he seemed thrown off when we revealed that none of us were American (Thorsten is German, and Anya was born in Slovakia.)

In any event, several bars later, I finally made it home around 3:30 in the morning, which impinged somewhat on my plans for a Saturday day trip to Ghent and Brugges, two smaller Belgian cities to the West of Brussels. When I finally was awake and alert enough, I headed to Gare du Midi and took the 30-minute train ride to Ghent, a beautiful city which is home to several universities. There are a couple of canals in the city, as you can see in the photo. Unfortunately, a combination of renovations and short time only allowed me to see a few things, but I still greatly enjoyed walking about the city, which is a lot lower key than Brussels.

One really beautiful church stood out, St. Baaf's Cathedral (aka St. Bavo's). It was really impressive, and was built upon the foundation of a church that was originally constructed in 1150 or thereabouts. You could go downstairs into the old church, which is currently housing some art from the local museum while it is under renovation. The cathedral itself was really cool, and was, as near as I could make out from the mostly Dutch inscriptions, the burial place for all the bishops of Ghent. Each had a separate compartment with one or more paintings depicting a biblical scene, so it was almost like a gallery within a church.

After I saw that, the Belfort (the watchtower, essentially) and the Castle, I visited a cafe or two, walked around some more, and had a quick dinner before returning to Brussels by about 8:30. Worn out from the night before, I decided to stay home and catch a good movie on television. There being very limited choices of English television, I watched "America's Sweethearts." I had hopes for this, if only because it featured John Cusack, but let's just say it wasn't that good. Though it was better than "The 6th Man" which followed it. A movie about two college basketball player brothers, one of whom dies of congenital heart failure. He comes back and makes his team better by divine intervention. At least that's what I got from the 30 minutes or so I could bear.