Ghent, Belgium

Two weekends ago on July 20, 2013 A. from the blog Around the Wherever and I decided to take a trip to Ghent, Belgium. We decided to book a trip with the USO since it requires almost no planning and both of us where a bit busy.  The USO “is an organization on post that provides services and entertainment to those in or affiliated with the military.” I was a bit wary about taking a trip with them due to the fact that the majority of the trip with the USO is a tour and pre-planned, and for someone like myself and A. who like to venture on our own we were unsure of how the trip would turn out.

Upon arrival the first thing we did was get paired with our tour guide. Teun (our tour guide) is a professor at a local university there in Gehnt. He was an excellent guide, and taught us that the Dutch can make a sexual joke out of just about anything.

We began by going through the Red Light District where woman sat in the window like some kind of display waiting to be bought. Following Teun showed us the differences in the French and Belgian parts of the city as well as how you could tell the age of a building by the type of stone used.  

One of the more interesting parts of the tour I found to be of a carving of a father and daughter that was above a door way. The father was sentenced to death by starvation, when the daughter visited him, since she had just had a child, let him drink milk from her breast in order to help sustain his life. Later the father was proved to be innocent and set free.

We were also lucky enough to visit on the 1^st day of a 10 day festival. Every year Ghent holds the largest street festival in all of Europe. Due to this fact A. and I discovered two interesting things:

1)      Public toilets, known as pissers, where everywhere. For an American this was slightly disturbing because as you can see from the picture, they were on random street corners, and completely open. At one point I saw three men using the quad-pisser at once….

2)      As an opening for the first day of the festival a big parade was scheduled to take place that afternoon. As A. and I walked around we began to notice that several people had on some interesting clown hats. It became our mission to obtain one of such hats for ourselves. After much walking and much excitement, we found the source.

We determined we must wear the hat the rest of the day. Overjoyed, we then headed to the visitor center to see what we could do in our free time.  The people at the visitor center found these two crazy Americans so amusing that of course they needed to take our picture and post it to their Facebook page.

Meeting back with the group for a boat ride through the city, and then a bit more exploration of our own, we ended the day knowing we needed to come back!

There is so much more I could talk about Ghent, it was too much fun, but blog post are not book of course lol, so I guess one day you shall have to venture there yourself and find out :) 

In conclusion a quote from A.

“At $99 per person for the trip, which included roundtrip busing, a tour led by college faculty, and a boat ride, the trip was less expensive than just buying train tickets on our own would have been. The upside was that even though the trip had two planned events, we also had about five hours to do our own thing.”