Belgian Holiday, part 1, Ghent

We flew into Brussels and immediately hopped a train to Ghent. It's a beautiful town with many medieval buildings still intact. Like several other Belgium cities, Ghent escaped most of the bombing in WWII. The Dutch people who lived there had perfected the science and art of civil engineering and created a network of canals that made Ghent a port city and important trading location.

Ghent is a tourist town, but it's also a university city. Everyone there seems to speak at least three languages, Dutch, French, and English. All we had to do there, and everywhere in Belgium really, is say hello and they would immediately know we were Americans and would converse with us in English. The bus and train stations were a little tricky because the primary language is Dutch, but we got by.

This building on the city square next to the bell tower is a
theater. I suppose it was an opera house originally.

The altar inside the nearest cathedral.

It's a beautiful city. There are cathedrals, of course, but they were not the center of town. In Ghent and elsewhere, the town square was dominated by a municipal building, not a religious one. There was no Henry VIII in Belgium, so the big cathedrals are still Roman Catholic, but they feel more like art museums than churches for the most part. Some of them charge admission for what you actually want to see and they all have gift shops. They do have some serious artwork, the buildings themselves, the ecclesiastical gold and silver crafts, paintings by many old masters, and sculpture galore.

We arrived in Ghent a couple days before the tour actually began so we had time to explore on our own. It's definitely a town I'd return to. We hit a lot of the highlights but barely scratched the surface of all the things we could have seen and done.

I'm not sure what the catholics call this, but
it's functionally the pulpit, where the sermon and
readings would be given, not the altar.

The rivers are now completely controlled and contained as
part of the network of canals. Trading houses lined the river.

The view from the castle.

Wildflower growing from the castle wall. I'd be torn if I was
in charge of maintenance. This sort of thing is very pretty, but
ultimately destructive of the wall. 

We took a boat trip and this is a view of some of the trading
houses from the river.

This is the end of one of the canals, and if I remember correctly, it's the only surviving part of the
old medieval wall that once surrounded the city.