We were heading to Belgium with very little expectation or idea of what it had to offer, other then chocolate, beer and waffles! It hasn't been a country which people rave about or mention in our experience throughout this trip, or previously. Being a passionate cyclist, I'm aware of the significants of cycling in Belgium. Big races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liege-Bastogne-Liege are two of the five biggest one day races in professional cycling!
Reading our Lonely Planet book, it's recommendation was to go to Bruges - a canal-based city and sometime referred to as The Venice of the North. Bruges was considered a must see. However we read a lot of traveller reviews which described the town as a tourist hot spot and a better option maybe Ghent. At this stage we don't have oodles of time because of an organised Workaway for Christmas... so we rolled the dice and decide that Ghent will be a better option. It is only 30min by train to Brussels (which we want to see), is architecturally comparable to Bruges and supposedly less touristy - TICK.
We arrive at the Brussels train station after a short train ride from Cologne, where we have to get tickets and change to a Belgium connection to get out to Ghent. Usually we try and fumble our way through automated ticket machines at the train stations but in this instance we decided to go to the ticked office for some reason... We were greeted by a nice bloke in French, which was great because I could reply "Bonjourrr, parlez-vous anglais?". He was very helpful and said Ghent was a great town which he preferred to Bruges, and sold us a reasonably priced ticket to Brussels which we planned to visit the next day. This ticket sales fella was one of the nicest people we had came across in a while which peped us up and gave us a great start to the new country.
Belgium is a little bit more expensive than Germany, and to save on accommodation our Airbnb was a bit of a hike from the centre of town. A couple of minutes on the train, 5 minutes on a bus then about a 2km walk. We had a pretty comfortable ensuite apartment with a gay couple as hosts and their two cats. The house smelt a bit catty, and I didn't see it but Amy said there was some cat shit in one of the hallways leading to our room... Otherwise we had our own tea and coffee and a couple of snacks in a reasonably sized room with full access to their kitchen for meals which was perfect.
After dropping off our stuff at the apartment we headed back into the town centre for a good look around as well as getting some groceries. We were able to get onto a bus that took us all the way into the city centre for $8, where we were greeted with plenty of people, plenty of Christmas lights and Christmas markets. The centre of the old town has plenty of grand old buildings which against the back drop of Christmas made for a pretty spectacular scene.
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| Truffle chocolate! looks like rusty steel eh. Pretty impressive. |
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| First things first, we were told in Munich by a couple of American's to try and eat our weight in Belgium Waffles because they were so good. We can agree, they were delish! |
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| Interesting set up. One for the whole family. |
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| Local frothy. Super strong which we found out pretty quickly. We had a couple of these and they run at about 8-10% alcohol content, they sneak up on you! Glad they weren't serving out pints. |
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| Swiss raclette took us straight back to our time in the Swiss chalet! We had one but it wasn't anywhere near as good... |
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| We didn't really know what was going on here... Didn't know Australian ice cream was so sort after? |
On the second day we decided to head back to Brussels for the day to do the touristy things. It was so close, just half an hour on the train to the central train station and from what we've heard to see the sites, and experience a bit of the capital of the European Union a day was all we needed.
Straight out of a reasonably impressive and clean train station we were greeted with plenty of people out and about on the streets and in cafes.
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| The Guilds of Brussels in Palace Square - (a guild is a medieval association of craftsmen and merchants). |
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| Handmade chocolate - Check! |
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The worlds most disappointing tourist attraction - manneken pis (translating to "little man pee" in dutch)
The big fella was dressed up for the occasion, and has been standing here since the 1600's. |
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| Fritland - It didn't disappoint! The best thing about this was that the people behind the counter loaded up the servings± |
Tintin street art was everywhere! I think because it was created in Brussels.
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| There was a reasonable military presence in Brussels, walking around the streets and at the train stations. |
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| Back in Ghent and to finish off the cracking day with a cracking sunset. |
Our third day based in Ghent we hired bikes and headed out on a cold day to ride along a few of the canals and explore a little bit of the old city centre. One thing we figured out pretty quick was majority of the streets were cobbled, which made the going pretty tough! You couldn't own high heels in this town. There was a fair bit of cycling infrastructure as to be expected, and plenty of public transport.
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| Some castle... had to pay to visit so we just took a quick snap and continued onward. |
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| Main pedestrian street and where the majority of the Christmas markets and ice skating rink was. Plenty of people out and about in the less than ideal conditions. |
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| Keen to try a Belgium pub, we headed to a Bierhuis mid afternoon to try a couple of the local brews. The beer here is completely different to anything we've had. Full flavoured and strong! |
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The rigs.
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Is been nearly two months now since we were in Ghent, and we've continued to meet people who rave about Bruges. Maybe we over looked it, either way we enjoyed our couple of days here - we could have fitted more sites into our time but it was pretty cold and miserable. The Christmas markets were pretty impressive but the quality of food and products was sub-par compared to Germany...
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