Ghent in the Rain

Day 7 

When we arrived in Brussels yesterday, the nice man at our aparthotel warned us that there was to be a big (but peaceful) demonstration outside the European Parliament.  The Catalonians who had recently voted to secede from Spain were coming to Brussels en masse to make their point.  We had originally decided to alternate our days out of Brussels with exploring the city and this demonstration just reinforced those plans.

We walked down to Gare Centrale and bought a 10 trip ticket which gave us quite a discount on buying separate tickets for each trip we wanted to take, and x 2 ‘cos there are two of us.

We decided to visit Ghent today and will do Bruges tomorrow or Saturday.  The trip on an IC train takes just on half an hour.  The station is about 2.5km  from the centre of the town so we set off  and followed the canal  towards our first stop at Gravensteen (Castle of the Counts) admiring the fabulous local buildings and some pretty impressive bike parking  as we went.

Gravensteen dates from the 12^th century and is unusual in that it is not perched high above the town, but rather right on the edge of the canal.  Modelled on castles seen by Phillip of Alsace during the crusades, it’s full of spiral staircases and with amazing battlements, it has been used as the Palace of Justice (courthouse) a cotton mill and had several centuries falling into disrepair before being renovated in stages from about 1885 when it was bought by the City of Ghent.

Home to a small but pretty nasty collection of weapons and torture devices, the castle features several ‘long-drop’ toilets, a moat (now just grassed) and several really big fireplaces.

By the time we’d explored the castle it was raining properly and we headed towards the Korenmarkt for lunch, a map read and a dry out.  We went through the still being assembled Christmas Market (much to my disappointment) and had lunch in a little sandwich place right beside the World Heritage Listed Belfort.

Always keen to visit churches (and tempt fate wondering if I will burst into flames – being the dirty little heathen that I am) we spent quite some time inside St Bavo’s, the Catholic Cathedral in Ghent.  The first church on the site was a wooden one consecrated in 942 and expanded in the Romanesque style in 1038. You can see part of the original church in the crypt which now houses an amazing collection of ecclesiastical garments, reliquaries  and liturgical paraphernalia

Further expansions took place from the 14th to the 16th centuries,  and in 1559 it became a cathedral with the founding of the Diocese of Ghent.  How St Bavo’s came to have a whale skeleton hanging in the nave is beyond me… but there it was.

It starts getting dark around 3.30pm and since the rain was showing no inclination to disappear, and the wind had come up we headed for the station and the trip back to Brussels, only to be met there by most of the 20,000 Catalonians who were in town to protest at the European Parliament.



Tomorrow we’ll get to Bruges.