Gent

Anais and I

Anais was an AFS student in Christchurch, she stayed with me last year when she visited Wellington. I left the house early on Thursday morning, had another awkward goobye with Jan, and took the bus and then train to Gent. I had heard great things about Gent and was quite excited to see the city. The attitude towards smoking is really different here in Belgium compared to in NZ, and on the way there we passed another train with the driver leaning against the open window smoking a cigarette! Also, the guy inside the train station who was sitting on that big machine they use to clean the floors was smoking. They've only just made it illegal to smoke inside bars here this month, NZ really is a lot more advanced than Europe on that one!

Gent

I arrived in the early afternoon, luckily Anais lives really close to the train station and it wasn't too far to go to dump my bags. I'm already over the 'backpack' part of backpacking again! Her house is another of those tall, skinny, four story places that I love! We spent some time just hanging out there and catching up, and then headed into the city for a quick look around. We biked in, Gent is really well set-up for bikes but it's a bit tricky at the moment as there is heaps of road works going on. We visited some shops and I managed to find some summer shoes that fit (shoes here go up to 41, and Im usually a 44 or 45!) and then we just wandered around for awhile to give me a quick look.

Then we headed home, and I had a near-miss with a car that pulled out of a side road and stopped on the cycle lane, then in avoiding the car I swerved and skidded on some tram lines, and I ended up hitting the ground! I just got a few grazes and bruised my pride, but not wearing a helmet makes that kind of thing so much scarier, all I was thinking about as I was going down was how unprotected my head was if a car coming down the road didn't see me there! We took the dog for a walk, they have a gorgeous nine-month old boarder collie, he is really cute even if he's still quite naughty! He ate half of the speculoos muffins off the bench while I was there! Anais' mum taught her how to make roast chicken french-style, so we had a great dinner and I spent a long time just sitting there with a few glasses of wine talking to everyone. Her parents are amazing and really interesting, her mother is English, her father is Belgian and has done AFS to Alaska, and they lived together in France where he worked as a Programme Manager for AFS, so they had a lot of cool stories and we discussed a whole lot of different topics. We'd kind of talked about going out that night, but after talking for ages and it starting to rain, we stayed in.

Castle in Gent

Friday morning we headed back into the city centre and this time walked around a lot more slowly. Gent has some canals running through it, I think not as many as in Brugges, and has a big castle in the centre. There are a lot of really old buildings, and some unusual ones like a big hall that they used to use for trade, that I took a million photos of. It is a really lovely city, one of the prettiest I've been in for a long time, and I really like how it isn't as touristy as Brugges is, but I can tell that now I've spent so much time in this part of Europe my level of excitement just isn't what it was when I had first arrived. 

One thing that took some getting used to here is how acceptable taking dogs everywhere is. They can go in the trains, buses and trams, and into shops and even restaurants. I think that's illegal in NZ? Or at least against the rules of the bus companies. Here, shops owners often take their own dog with them to work, we went into a few clothing shops where there were dogs just chilling under a rack of garments!

They have a huge market there every Friday that sprawls out of the 'Friday Market' square into the surrounding areas, we had a look around and it was only the cost of international postage that stopped me picking up a few things! The antiquey stuff that you can get over here is really amazing. We also looked in some second-hand clothing stores and same deal there, a lot of it would fetch big money under the labels of 'retro' and 'vintage' in NZ.  We had vegetarian burgers in a little cafe in a side street, and went to a chocolate-bar: amazing! Everything there is chocolate-based, both drinks and food. Anais had bread sticks with chocolate dip, and I had a white chocolate praline hot chocolate. Only speculoos flavor hot-chocolates could make that place cooler, someone should open one in NZ! After another walk with the dog, we went out for dinner at a local greek place. I tried the greek wine, retsina, that is flavoured with pine resin for the first time, I quite like the flavor, and we split a big plate of different greek dishes. Then it was time for bed, with an early start the next morning to train to Liege!

So it's been a pretty chilled out couple of days, I really needed the change to unwind a bit after working so much recently and the stress of packing, and I'm glad that we spent time just talking and soaking up the atmosphere rather than doing the mad-dash-to-all-of-the-tourist-sites thing. I think this weekend is going to be a bit crazy as we are going to a music festival and camping there, and I'm getting sicker by the day, I'm just hoping my body can hold out until I reach Germany where I can relax and spend a couple of days in bed really getting rid of this cold!

More photos are here.