We spent the second half of our week in Belgium in the student city of Ghent, a beautiful city that resembles Amsterdam with it’s canals and pretty buildings lining the waters edge.
WEDNESDAY PART TWO
After only a 30 minute train to Ghent I attempted to figure out the tram system. I knew what tram I had to get, and where I had to get off, but for some reason Ghent decided it wasn’t necessary to have maps or signs, or anything to help non-locals find their way around. I ended up getting the tram in the direction that was busiest and luckily that worked for me! I made my way to our boat(!!!) and met the girls who had gotten there earlier.
The boat was amazing, it is essentially a youth hostel, but on a boat and is super eco friendly, they recycle their own toilet water with a reed system on the boat, bio/vegetarian breakfasts and was just very chilled. The fridge worked on a honesty system where you just take what you want and pay for it at the end of your stay. Too cute, it was all lovely!
We cooked ourselves some rice in the microwave for dinner as we forgot there was no hobs.. Woops… And then had some drinks out of the honesty fridge before heading into the centre of town for the evening.
Our walk into town didn’t go just as smoothly as planned, first of it was a lot further than we expected and took us over half an hour in chilly weather to get there. Secondly, in our attempt to stay warm we were singing along to Ed Sheeran when we head someone yell something at us. Now as three girls in an unusual city late at night, this freaked us out, so we started to walk quicker, and then so did they, running after us. It wasn’t until he caught up and turned on our torch that we realised that we had been running away from the police and not some creepy person. Luckily after explaining our situation and him understanding as he’d been calling to us in Flemish, he let us on our way as long as we sung a little quieter haha.
We had some drinks in a pub in the student centre and met some boys who were studying in Ghent and where on their sports team night out, we played fuss-ball (or fuzzy as Steff calls it) and lost. Apparently the consequence for that is to crawl under the table so of course we did, which almost resulted in Stef loosing her passport – not good, but we found it in one of our following crawls under the table!
Unlike Perigueux where every food place closes at 10pm, in Ghent we were able to get some late night food from apparently the best “frites” (chip) shop in the city, and they were pretty amazing – not sure if thats from the lack of chip shops in France or the chips actually were that good haha.
After cycling round squares on Félix’s bike and finding Maeve, we started our long walk back to the Hostel and were tucked up in bed by 5am – we’re not in Périgueux anymore!
THURSDAY
We woke up early to benefit from the hostels free breakfast before returning to bed as we were exhausted from last nights antics. At a more reasonable time we got ourselves ready and went to Explore Ghent. It really is a lovely city, and I’d jump at the chance to go back. It’s one of those cities that is small enough to explore on foot, yet is still a decent size. With nothing in particular that we wanted to see, we spent the afternoon wandering the windy streets and canals of Ghent before stopping of for some food. Ghent is super vegetarian friendly so we ended up eating some pretty amazing burgers at one of its many vegetarian restaurants , also because it had WiFi and we needed to sort out our boarding passes haha.
We had a relaxed evening the Hostel playing some Flemish Scrabble (the only difference being the crazy amount of consonants!) and were tucked up in bed by 10am ready to start our 10 hour journey back to Périgueux at 6.30am the next morning!
Flemish Scrabble
C'EST LA VIE 