Our second rest day, so no driving – the car remained in the underground car park all day. We weren’t eating in this hotel for breakfast as the choice in Ghent was likely to be extensive, so we wandered into town looking for something suitable on the way to a day of sightseeing. We’ve learned that decaf coffee anywhere outside the UK is just trash, but the hot chocolates we found for breakfast were exceptional.
The plan for the day was to buy a tourist pass which gained us entry to numerous paid attractions, and free use of the water taxi and all land-based public transport. After collecting these (which took a while as the chap in Tourist Information was very keen we took all of his maps despite already having them. Once we got away from him, we headed to the Gravensteen, Ghent’s castle. Remarkably tidy and well maintained, there was lots to look at from the usual crenelations, to a torture dungeon, a display of weaponry, and a “secreet” bunker used by the Nazis. Worth a visit.
Next stop was a walk through the streets of Paters Hol, a very pretty area which contained residential properties and restaurants, taking us back to the main tourist area.
We then headed to “graffiti street”, which quite obviously was a street with walls covered in graffiti. Much of it had been painted over in readiness for fresh artwork to be applied, but some remained and was definitely Halloween themed. Either side of the street we found small shops selling various things.
From here we walked to St-Baafskathedral, Ghent’s cathedral. Not quite the scale of Koln’s cathedral the day before but more ornate, and in the back was a famous painting by Reuben and a very detailed altar piece comprising of numerous paintings depicting a religious scene of some kind. It was intricate in its quality, and vibrantly coloured despite its obvious age.
We kept going, onward to the Belfort, a huge tower which you could climb for an aerial view of Ghent. The good news was it was a lift up and stairs down, with various displays of bell and chime-related things on each of 3 floors between the top and bottom. The main bell itself was chimed using a mechanism much like a music box, but on a much bigger scale. Each hole in the barrel was hand cut square, there were thousands of them.
Our final stop before lunch was a smaller church, but one that was lit with huge skylights. Lunch was simple – frites and mayonnaise.
After lunch we decided to take the water taxi, which was a hop-on-hop-off service. However we were just going to stay on for as long as we fancied, getting off and returning by tram – mostly to maximise the value of our tourist cards. The boat was nearly empty and we watched the city go by with only the captain telling us useful/useless information as we chugged along.
When we arrived at stop 4, St-Pieterskirk, he told us to all get off the boat and gave us a mini-guided tour of the outside of the very old monastery. It looked so interesting we decided to stay – a good decision, as the building was quite interesting, as was the photography exhibition inside (nowhere near as good at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year we visited almost 2 weeks before), and the fruit garden including mini-vineyard.
We then caught the tram back to the hotel, had coffee (which was actually very good) and cake whilst waiting for our room to be cleaned. After a short break we returned to somewhere in Paters Hol we’d seen earlier for dinner. Here we had Watervooi and beef stew, both local dishes.
