So to get to Ghent, as we did only two days after Antwerp, we did have to get up rather early because we had to take the train from Antwerp. We decided to go on that day because the weather was going to be nice. While I was in Europe, it was super windy pretty much every day, and it rained quite a few days, so if we were going to go places we wanted to go on not-rainy days.
We did not take this advice from the tourism website, but that’s okay:
Before sunrise
Antwerp Centraal
On the train to Ghent. Blurred it for ya, but it’s still pretty shocking to me that advertisements and other things in Europe allow swearing. Also I can read the Dutch.
Getting out of the train station and the surrounding parking lot was not great, and the walk to the city centre isn’t the nicest (where is the sidewalk going? Why are there parked cars on it?), but once you get to the old city things pick up drastically.
Although this bit, which is just past the train station, isn’t too bad from this angle.
Okay now we’re getting somewhere. And by somewhere I meant the Vrijdagmarkt. We were still so early there were hardly any people around, and as you can see there is no Christmas market in this particular square.
Google maps says: “This giant, historic red iron cannon was a 15th-century weapon used in the siege of Oudenaarde.” Tharash for scale.
Ah here we are, het Gravensteen.
We had bought our tickets online, so we skipped the line-up (already substantial for the early hour).
The courtyard
Het Gravensteen (literally translated “the Count’s Stone”) was built by Philip of Alsace, and a lot of the audioguide focused on him and also his first wife, Elisabeth.
Up these stairs through this arch and to the left is the giftshop, where you pick up the audioguides. The audioguides are recorded by a local comedian, and they are quite silly. The recording is a bit loud and I couldn’t find a volume control. We both got them in English so we could enjoy the same jokes.
The interior was very jazzed up for the holiday. In this first room, the audio guide claimed that this was the first place that chimneys were used on indoor fireplaces, and also explained (in the most romantic idealized fairy-tale way possible) the establishment of Flanders as a result of the elopement of Baldwin Ironarm and Judith of Flanders.
In the great hall was displayed the best of the armoury. I like the ceramic-hilted rapier.
There were a number of early guns with intricate inlay.
The roof has amazing views.
Here on the roof, and also in the countess’s chambers, I was a little blindsided when the audioguide narrator started talking about Count Philip’s relationship with his first wife Elisabeth, which was apparently not great (he was a workaholic) – but he started getting into a bit of *spicy* fanfic about them and how maybe they could have had an okay relationship after all off the record. Besides that time that she cheated on him because he was neglecting her and he murdered her lover in response. Yeah. Besides that.
The Three Towers of Ghent: St. Bavo’s Cathedral, the Belfry, and St. Nicholas’ Church
I’m quite pleased with this picture, myself
I skipped most of this room; this was where the guide talked about the top five most gruesome executions done here at the castle. I listened to the one about being boiled alive, and then noped out halfway through the next one, a tale of beheading 17 people simultaneously. You can see some heads on the banner as a reference to that, and some executioner’s swords in the back.
I also only looked briefly into the torture chambers, which were the next room located below the previous one, and skipped the audio guide for that one. I just can’t stand to think about people getting hurt and killed.
It seems that there have been some modifications, which is an absolutely surefire way to get me wondering what it looked like before, and then also what it looked like before THAT.
That is an extremely large arch, and also a bit that hasn’t been restored.
The interior of the gatehouse, where the guide talked about – surprise, surprise – more torture, but this one’s more positive because if you got tortured in the gatehouse, your friends were allowed to come and encourage you not to give up. And if you lasted a whole week, then you got to go free. …I like the decor though. Also apparently you get to put a cross window in if you’ve been on Crusade.
Photo by MH
After we had seen the whole castle, we went to the gift shop to return the audio guides and do some shopping. Tharash really liked the owl dolls they were decorating some of their Christmas displays with, so he got one of those; I bought a puzzle as a gift.
I really like this Poseidon-themed building. Behind it is the tourist info building. Apparently this was the gate to the old fish market.
This is the smallest café in town, just that tiny beige building. But the patio adds lots of seating space. The ancient building behind it is the Groot Vleeshuis, or the Great Butchers’ Hall
Photo by MH
This is on the big bridge, the carvings are all different for each pillar like this.
Shiny red granite
St. Michael appears to have a rubber sword here
Me and the Three Towers.
All these different styles in just a few buildings.
We bought wraps at a supermarket for lunch. Mine was in an ‘egg wrap’ which is basically a crepe, I think.
The interior of the Church
Photo by MH
Photo by MH
The little organ!
You can see vague angels on the ceiling.
Passage to the organ is pretty straightforward.
Someone came in to start playing the organ, which kept me occupied for a good length of time because they kept playing different things with different registrations!
This part is under restoration, tourists are not allowed in but there is a transparent door. You can see that the floor was raised at once point, but they are returning it to medieval level so the pillars need that extra platform. Also a Cavaillé-Coll organ.
After the church, we had some time to spend before our scheduled timeslot up the Belfry, so we walked through the Christmas market and bought some fresh waffles. Sadly for me, there were too many people around for me to feel comfortable taking my mask off and eating it right there, and by the time we found a quiet place to sit, the wind had made the waffles cold. And then it blew the waffle’s powdered sugar all over me. Oh well. Still tasty.
Then we went to walk along one of the suggested paths in a brochure we had picked up at the tourist info. I didn’t take any pictures of it (difficult to get good angles since it is a rather narrow alley), but one of the first things we walked through was an alley that has every inch been covered in graffiti. Then we looped through the southeastern part of the inner city, not going as far as the university, though we did walk past De Krook, which is a pretty neat modern library.
The ‘City Pavilion’, I guess a modern market hall.
This bell is named Roland and it used to be in the Belfry until they got a new one just as big.
Close-up of the dragon (same as the previous photo, just cropped and not resized)
The front of the Cathedral has had most of its statues removed. Silly Calvinists.
According to Ghent tourism, this is the 15th century Guildhouse of the Tanners
The city hall is in two styles. This is the Late Gothic side. The other side is Renaissance, and I didn’t get a good picture of that. (Panorama to try and show how big it is)
We randomly happened on this wall of birds!
The intersection on the right was gridlocked car traffic trying to get to a parking garage, and there was an unnecessary amount of horn honking. You’d think people would know better than to take their motor vehicles into the old city centre on a day with very large public gatherings (Christmas market).
This is, according to our map, the Castle of Gerald the Devil. (panorama picture)
Our walk took us through this back alley that has a stair up to the main street, which is kind of cool. It has a door at the top which I suppose gets locked at night.
Just a nice brightly-painted house
I like this building’s design, and the artwork on the wall
The back of the cathedral
The van Eyck brothers
Photo by MH
Then we went to the Belfry at our appointed ticket time; the lobby is was formerly a… cloth market? Guildhall of clothmakers? My memories are already vague and so is Wikipedia. But you can walk around it for a bit, and then in the tower itself there are several museum levels, most of the signs of which are squarely in Dutch/Flemish, so I couldn’t read that much of it. Also they had a weird thing: there’s an elevator installed that will take you to the observation deck, and then you take the stairs down. We didn’t know why at the time. Anyway, when we went up, it deposited us on the second of the three museum levels. And any time that it opened going up, it was full of people, of course, and we didn’t want to go back down… So I got impatient and took the stairs up. We were very, very lucky not to meet anyone coming back down. I managed to jog for quite a ways before my thighs gave out (I hate stairs).
This is the new big bell, it reads: “My Ghent, my people
so proud, so loyal
your language and interpreter
in joy or mourning”
At the top, we found out why the elevator is supposed to take you to the top first: the observation level is extremely narrow. It’s big enough for one person comfortably, but two people trying to get past each other in opposite directions, with backpacks, is very uncomfortable. …We stuck it out and took our pictures anyway, and we weren’t the only ones.
A gargoyle, and the park where we ate waffles
The church!
Photo by MH
We were up the tower at the perfect time for sunset. Photo by MH
Photo by MH
The clock
This doesn’t look that narrow, I suppose, but it is
Then we went back down; in the lobby they do have a coin machine for those collectible coins, but the design didn’t match the ones I already had. Then I went to use a washroom, and there were big line-ups at all the washrooms of course because of the Christmas market, but because Europe builds its bathroom stalls to be fully enclosed little rooms, the washroom I used was essentially unisex and it wasn’t a problem. And then we went to find dinner.
Our first option was closed, iirc, so we went to our second option, a vegetarian/vegan burger joint. It was really weird because there was NO ONE there. No customers, and even no staff. Sure, it was like 4:30pm, but it’s still a bit weird to have no one there? Made me worry that the food wouldn’t be so good. But after a bit, a staff person came out, so we went in. They have an electronic order system, which was really nice – I could decide what I wanted and change my mind as many times as I liked without inconveniencing anyone. I had the mushroom burger and a mango smoothie, and Tharash had the Winterburger and a beer. It came with sweet potato fries, which I find more filling than regular fries (Tharash got a salad for a side). Tbh, the food was good but not amazing, but the important thing was THERE WAS A CAT. I went to sit close to the cat without getting near its personal space.
Then we walked around the city again, because Ghent has won awards for their artistic lighting highlighting their historic buildings and even have suggested walking routes to see it.
Tharash’s camera settings were considerably more reddish than mine, giving the city a more medieval feel. Photo by MH
Reminds me a bit of Valheim in this light tbh. Photo by MH
Parallel picture to the picture he took of me : D
What he was actually doing. Photo by MH
I like that the clock is illuminated with LEDs. Photo by MH
Photo by MH
I asked him to take a picture of the street light decorations because my phone wasn’t having it. Photo by MH
And at last we walked back to the train, had a hard time finding the pedestrian entrance to the station, and headed back to Antwerp. My feet were quite tired by this point. Antwerp train station also has nice lighting, now that I was thinking about lighting. But we didn’t stop to take too many pictures, we had to go to the bus.
I like that the clock is set in a little dome that kind of imitates the big overall dome of the whole train station
Afterwards, Tharash asked me “now you’ve been to all of the three great Flemish cities [Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp], what do you think?” And what I think is that all three of them are great and I would love to spend more time in any of them. Even Bruges, which is highly touristy in its old city. I’m not sure I can pick a favourite, but I’ve spent the most time in Antwerp, so I do like it a lot, I’ve been even just through it often enough that it feels familiar.