I don’t have a ton to say about Ghent, we arrived during the Gentse Feesten, which is a 10 day music festival with stages scattered around the historical center. Our hotel was perched right in the middle of this, literally 3 doors away from what I believe is the main stage,certainly seemed the biggest. As you might have guessed has a pretty contrasting list of pros and cons.
During the day Ghent is pretty cool, restaurants and tea-rooms line the streets, and you can always find a place to sit and sample a wide variety of local beers. During our stay there was a really impressive selection from place to place with very little overlap. I did my best to be a good tourist and try the gamut. My recommendations on this front is the karmeliet trippel, and the westmalle trippel, both Trappists, and both excellent. I learned (a little too late might I add), that tripel translates to triple (shocking I know…) and is referring to the strength, I was several tripels in when our waiter served me a bottle and a glass and I noticed that it was 9.4%… shhhheeeeessshhh…
Because of all the traffic in the squares this time of year though, service felt pretty bad, and there was a lot of waiting around, and pushing through crowded streets. I’m the sort of guy who likes to go at my own pace and I really didn’t feel like I could here.
We did a couple touristy things though, we took a guided tour around the canal, but the guide was sort of hard to understand, and didn’t have too much flavor in there to keep my attention. We also toured a castle in the middle of town (name is escaping me at the moment), that was home to instruments of murder and torture… Neat stuff, but really off putting with the events of the feswtival happening outside, particularly the singing of songs from Pocahontas, and Mary Poppins… What a contrast.
The biggest downside to the whole experience to me, is that the whole place pretty much stank of urine the whole time we were there, they actually have completely exposed plastic urinals scattered around the city, convenient for the male population sure, but there are certain consequences to encouraging people to pee in public streets, the smell is the most obvious, it is also creepy to see some dude staring at you when you walk by when you know he’s got his junk out… Just weird…
I don’t think Ghent this time of year is my kind of place, but I could definitely see the potential if it were simply the local traffic, where you could really appreciate the charm of the old city.
Oh well! Off to Amsterdam for the night, first stop van gogh museum!
