Belgium, Day One: Ghent

I've always wanted to visit Belgium, although that's mostly because I knew it was only ever a train ride away. Apart from popular references to certain films and chocolate it wasn't ever on my list. But the nudge from a friend to have a cheeky pre-Ramadan trip was enough to get me on the Eurostar today.

I may have written about this before but the dissonance us islanders get by riding a train to a different country is real, and although the Eurostar is decades old now, leaving the country in a manner other than a plane or a boat never quite gets old. That it connects capitals, can take liquids, and is super fast just add to the overall novelty.

So two days and two nights was supposed to be an easy going couple of days in Brussels, but of course we also had to go and see Bruges. Rather than day trip it, we decided to book our first night in the latter and go straight there after arriving, and spend the last day in Brussels, close to our Eurostar back. But of course this being me and with my particular relationship with travel (trigger warning: it's overrated), the plan ever expanded.

All this preamble is to say that after learning that a train ticket to Bruges (or anywhere) allowed us to stop off at any stop as many times as we wanted to on the way, we figured it would be a good opportunity to see Ghent - we had some concerns that the week long train strike would force some of our options but it says a lot about the resilience of the train system here (or in Europe?) that we didn't even notice anything.

So, Ghent then. We got into the town around 5pm, and immediately made a beeline to a masjid to offer our daytime prayers using a tram and our legs to get there in good time. On the way we were (unreasonably it seems) surprised to see the odd halal kebab shop and "Free Palestine" sticker, so the vibes were definitely on.

 

Otherwise what we had was a quiet pretty town centre, maybe a bit dead, but worth the stop.

Getting into Bruges at around 8pm, I thought it was a bit too early to call it a night so took the opportunity to check out the deserted centre at night. Okay, fine, I was actually looking for some food and although I did manage to, it became clear that Bruges was going to be even more limited in options than Ghent was.