We started that Sunday with another delicious breakfast at The Pand. After a bit of a linger over the coffee we got ourselves together and checked out, leaving our bags there for a couple of hours, and went to have a look at a few more things around Brugge. We stopped along the way at the tapestry shop, Mille Fleurs on Wollestraat, because we’d decided which tapestry we wanted, so we bought it! Then we went into the Provincial Hof to see this very interesting presentation, Historium Brugge, a kind of multi-room, multi-electronic-media, interactive, audio-visual display thingamajig. You moved from room to room, and there was mist and sounds and videos and projections all around. It told the story of one of the assistants to the great Flemish artist and resident of Brugge, Jan van Eyck, and one of van Eyck’s models, who appeared in the painting titled The Virgin and Child with Canon Joris Van der Paele, pictured. This assistant would later marry the model used for the Virgin, and this was the story of how they met, and also of the parrot which also appears in the picture, held by the Virgin. Fanciful? No doubt, but it made for quite an entertaining story and it may have been true in part, and of course it was intended simply as a means of showing various aspects of life in the time of van Eyck in a more engaging way, and in that regard it succeeded quite well.  

After a bit of a squiz in the museum shop, we legged it for the great outdoors and went on a self-guided walk around part of the town.  It took us to the big statue of van Eyck at the end of the canal next to Spigelrei, then east out to the great canal encircling the city, where there were some pretty nifty windmills. Then it brought us back towards the centre, and on the way we saw a very nice outdoor restaurant by the canal, Uilenspiegel Restaurant, which we decided to drop into and have some lunch.  It was a great spot, overlooking the boats going past on the canal, and we had some fried things that weren’t too bad at all, plus our final half-pint of Zot.

From there it was just a short stroll back to our hotel.  We picked up our suitcases and the manager was nice enough to order us a cab to the train station.  The cabby was very friendly and seemed to marvel that we had survived so long in a country so riddled with poisonous snakes and spiders. Our whole experience of travelling by train in Belgium was very positive. Even this first foray, when we hadn’t made the investment to go first class, was pretty good.  We had to stand in the section near the doors the whole time because all the seats were taken, but it was nice scenery and a pretty fast trip.  We arrived in Ghent late in the afternoon and had no delay getting a cab to our hotel.  Much less stressful than driving really, and just fine if you’re only going city to city.

Ghent was great!  It was quite uncrowded, unlike Bruges which was teeming with people.  It was also very picturesque, in a kind of a gothic, very old way. The Gravensteen, the castle there, was terrific. We’d seen it in a TV program once and it was great looking, and the only thing that struck us was how much smaller it seemed in real life.  It was still brilliant though, and we decided to have dinner in the square outside it, at the Cafe de Sorre. I’m afraid I tackled another steak, while Jen had a kind of stew, another Belgium specialty, in a small earthenwear pot thing, which I had a taste of and was very nice.  It was a great dinner.  Later we made our way back towards our hotel, the Ghent Marriott, which was one of the coolest modern hotels we had on the trip.  Its facade, facing the main canal, was one of the old buildings, but when you went inside, it opened up like a huge tardis, and had cool colour-changing neon on the giant parabolic glass of the atrium above.  The room itself was very comfortable and modern, and nicely appointed.  Before turning in we went out to the canal again to take some photos of the canal in the dark, and we got some good shots.  Then it was off to bed after an eventful day!

The Gravensteen Castle