Belgium

OK so I'm back in London (Matt's Bat-base!) and we have just come back from a short visit to Belgium. Technically I went to France too, as the train had to pass through France to get to Beligum hehe - The train didn't stop there, and so I never touched down in France, but maybe that was for the best haha. (But technically I've still been there now!)

Anyhow, it's only 2 hours from London to Belgium - how crazy is that?! Imagine doing that in New Zealand - not that we have any high speed trains that travel for 2 hours straight... but it's like travel on the road for 2 hours and you seem to only just get down the road... here in England you can been in completely new and crazy countries and your last meal hasn't even digested properly haha.

So the train stopped in Brussels (I didn't see Jean-Claude though), and then we found our way to another train that was headed to the town of Gent. Michelle and Matthew are pretty seasoned travelers around Europe so I followed them around and tried to pick up a few tricks of the trade for traveling. Always get a map of your town when you get to your final destination. You may think the town is small and you can get around alright, but you will probably need a map for any real big towns or city, if nothing else then to just get your bearings from time to time. Maps are cheap and usually real easy to find (just check the local information area!) That was Matthew's tip. Michelle's tip is to make sure that the first thing out of your mouth comes out in Pigeon English, and in a French accent it seems :-) I think the idea is to blame the French for as much as possible haha. anyhow, she seems to get away with it so I suppose it's a good tip :-)

Anyhow, back to the story. We got a train to Gent, which is Belgiums 3rd biggest City (with Brussels being the 1st and I don't know what is the 2nd). We got off at the train station and found a map and checked it out. Just over a kilometer from the train station to the Hotel area. We could have walked but we decided to catch a tram. Matthew rocked straight up to a tram and asked which tram took us into town, the driver didn't seem to speak English to well but somehow a translation was made and I think tram no. 4 was what we needed to be looking for. We found the tram and got some tickets (via the ATM type machine) and jumped on board. On board the tram are little boxes (generally yellow) which you have to put you ticket into to 'validate' it. The machines print info on the tickets to show you have used it for this date or trip, so that the conducter can make sure you aren't ripping off the system. Conductors must be rare as I have seen one yet, but Michelle told me they got snapped and fined in Russia or something - so best do it as you never know when you will get thrown in prison :-)

Anyhow gawd, I better start to try and keep these blog stories a bit shorter - they are getting out of hand and showing off my penchant for typing endlessly and waffling.... So we get to the town centre and our hotel is right there, on the river/waterfront, in front of all the amazing historical buildings. We checked in and unloaded our bags into our room and went for a bit of a look around. Gent is quite a medievil looking town, cobbled paths everywhere, and on Sautrday afternoon when we got there it was very sunny, but it had a bit of a chilly wind going through it, prompting us to find a sunny beerhall (after walking a few blocks to find the best one ofcourse!) Well to cut a long story short, about 6 beers into into, we were trashed. The alcohol content of the lowest beer was about 8 percent, christ, talk about being put on your ass! haha The pub we went to was great, nice and cosy, warm with staff nearby all the time, easy to call over for more drink and nibbles when needed ;-) So after several hearty discussions, most of which were forgotten the next day, we took off around the town in search of food for dinner it was about 8:30pm by then. The good part about traveling alone is that you tend not to spend too long on deciding where to eat. With 3 people, it is always going to take a bit longer to come to an agreemnt :-) But eventually we decided on a bit of a French restaurant and I think I had one of the better steaks that I had had for a long time. And I had a 'Creme Brulet' - I think everyone has had one before, but I just never seemed to have tried one, so the one I had seemed very nice, Matthew seemed to think so too so it must have been good :-)

We stumbled back to the hotel after that, hit the Hotel's bar and got a drink each, I found a Bourbon (so hard to find bourbons in Europe - dunno why...) and we chatted a bit more. I went to bed after that and left the married couple together for some alone time at the bar but they weren't far behind me and they came up to the hotel room a few minutes later. We got a hotel room to share between the 3 of us - two king beds and it was quite good - the room was expensive, but cheap for the Marriot Hotels normal costs, so splitting the room 3 ways was quite good at the end of it all!.

The next day it turned out that Matthew and Michelle were actually quite drunk the night before. I was pretty buzzy and had gotten quite loud which means I was a bit drunk, but they had had a bit of memory loss on a few things which I found quite funny as they seemed ok to me at the time anyhow. I actually tried to sober up near the end because I thought they were sober too so I thought I had better not get too drunk.. haha I was the sober one for once haha!

Anyhow after checking out on Sunday, we did some major walking and exploration of Gent. It had several markets (like a book market, a plant market, a second hand junk market and a jewelery market) pretty neat! Most of the shops where closed on Sunday a very few where still open so we really just did some window shopping, all very nice really, such a relaxed on city, it was quite strange really. We eventually meandered back down to the train station and bought some mustard on the way (Belgium produces good hot mustard! haha!) and caught the train back to Brussels. We had decided to catch an early-ish train back to Brussels so I could have a quick look at it. They were right, it was a bit like London, hordes of people everywhere and it all seemed a bit stifling again. Gent was clearly the winner that weekend.

We got back on the Eurostar train around 8-9pm and after 2 hours we were back in London. Everyone pretty much crashed straight away, we were all very tired. We had accomplished a lot in just 48 hours. We had eaten, drunk and walked our way around the majority of Gent (it seemed) and we were all tired out. Check out the photo's I got a bit snap-happy that day so I hope they don't bore you too much :-)

Cheers
Matt