Day 47 - Antwerp & Ghent, Belgium

Today we check out of our accomodation and at some point in the day head for the medieval town of Ghent.
We woke up late as we were pretty exhausted from previous days, Katie timed it as nearly 12 hours of sleep. There is a local cafe incorporated at the hotel, for convenience we walked out of our room, down the corridor for a breakfast board as we couldn’t be stuffed walking and finding somewhere to eat. After breakfast we stored our luggage at the hotel and checked out.

We had one purpose this morning… buy Katie new pants, hers had shrunk in the wash in Ireland and only noticed now! So off to Meir we went!
Somehow we didn’t just leave with pants, also a few other pieces for Katie! I better say I brought another pair of shorts and some aftershave or she’ll yell at me for pointing her out! Once the shopping was done, we picked up lunch from the supermarket, got the bags and headed for the train station to catch the train to Ghent.
The train ride is 1hour long and thankfully we didn’t prebook any tickets, they currently are running an offer of 2 for 1 tickets. So travel in Belgium turns out not too bad!

Once at Ghent we decided walking the 24minutes wouldn’t be bad for us to the hotel… it was a very light mist of rain when we decided this… 10 minutes out from the accomodation the sky opened up, thankfully we had a wee bit of shelter from the trees and continued once it eased just a touch. The streets of Ghent are typical Europe… cobbles - so I ended up carrying the bags a lot through town. Once at the accomodation freshened up and headed out to see Ghent.

Our first stop was Grasburg Bridge, a narrow short bridge over the Leie canal in the centre of Ghent, this looks to Korenlei & Graslei streets, lined with the famous architectural buildings. These buildings were once home to grain storage & where the Hermitage Hotel is, used to be a brothel with the famous swans facing away from each other on the front of the building, as we later found out.
We stopped off at a local merchant - ‘Jack’s House’ for Oliebollen, Dutch donuts! Very fresh and tasted amazing.
Ghent used to be a very rich city, let’s put it this way, our walk from the train station you can see many bell towers and churches. The Main Street you can catch buses and trams from, you can see 3 main churches with one of the monasteries beside it. You can also see the Belfry of Ghent Het Belfort van Gent, this is nick named Little Ben as it was made after Big Ben but looks similar to Big Ben.
We decided, as we missed the walking tour we were thinking of, lets do a canal tour on a boat, 40 minutes for 10Euro. We went along 3 different canals seeing the buildings and the driver talking about them, I was sat next to the engine so I caught majority of the talking he did.

After the canal tour I was on the hunt for some Belgium beer, we found a place that said tasting trays, had me sold. Until I ordered it and the tasting tray was 3 full beers I needed to drink on my own as Katie was happy with a Cider. The three beers I had were all Belgian beers, first was a Cherry Sour called Kwak (8%), next was a blonde ale called Antigoon (6%) & to finish off the tasting, a brown ale called Adriaen (10%). While at the tasting the weather had looked threatening to take a turn again, sure enough it did and it rained pretty hard. Katie looked at the weather app and it said should stop in 7 minutes, the bartender agreed, 7 minutes went past and sure enough apple forecast was right for once!

After the tasting I was somewhat hungry, we decided keep it simple and got some more frites from Frites Atelier, I got the Thai Chicken Frites & Katie got the Parmesan & Basil Frites.
Afterwards I figured I hadn’t eaten my way through Belgium so opted from a waffle… from the same place we got the donuts. The lady remembered me and laughed saying you can come back tomorrow, or in an hour your choice.

We went back to the accomodation to climb the creaky stairs to our room.Read more