home again, home again

i can't imagine there are terribly many people who just randomly go off to belgium for three days with very little notice... for fun. but, yes, i am one of them. i confess that i love belgium. i love the confused languages, the horror that is the mannekin pis (alas, he was not wearing one of his costumes this week - apparently earlier in the week he was dressed as a dentist), the food... dear god the food, and the peculiar dark underbelly of the belgian character.

i was originally meant to meet up with a friend to show her the delights of brussels, but when that plan fell through after the eurostar tickets were booked, i decided to take a slightly different tack and make a plan that would ensure i'd see something new. i've been impoverished in brussels before... it's not really a city that is good to be poor in and i could do without going through it again, so i caught my eurostar to brussels... and then went to ghent.

alas, along with my general current penury, the fates saw fit to make a complete joke out of the ££/€€ exchange rate, so it was not a tour of 5-star hotels, but rather an experiment in youth hostels. i find it rather interesting that you get the same quality sheets in a youth hostel as in a 5-star hotel. it's only the places in between that attempt to impose thinning, greasy polycotton nasties on you. so in that respect it was quite luxurious. dying for a bath and a quiet night now though!

anyway, ghent is delightful. i say this categorically and heartily recommend it, especially if you're thinking of having a nice quiet weekend or long weekend away. it's pretty but not chocolate-box - it's a real city and it feels lived in. it also has this somewhat bizarre mediaeval theme going for it. maybe i need to explain though. yes, it's a mediaeval city. but it's nowhere near as mediaeval as it looks. at the end of the 19th century someone looked up and said "hey! we have a castle!" so they promptly pulled down some of it and rebuilt bits that weren't there any more (or indeed ever - apparently the roof was quite different originally). then some bright spark decided that while they had some very nice mediaeval houses, if they had more then perhaps more people would come and see them. so they found some plans and built some more mediaeval houses. um. according to my map, although i didn't go forth and confirm this for myself, there is one house which actually exists in two different places - they found plans for a particular house, went ahead and built it new... then discovered that that exact house already existed once they stripped off whatever had been done to the facade, but underneath it was the genuine mediaeval version of the not-so-stately home they'd just built. bizarre and wonderful. the castle is all about the torture - grand living doesn't enter into it - they even have a rather too detailed torture museum. it's just wonderful.

so i spent two days in ghent, doing a lot of wandering. saw both the museum of contemperary art and the older stuff (a lot of which was by flemish/belgian artists, and showed things like belgian interpretations of impressionism and so on - great stuff) then caught a train back to brussels, where i explored... um... an art gallery - the musées royaux des beaux-arts de belgique. just for a change. and wow, what a collection! genius heironymous bosch, and their late 19th/early 20th century collection is brilliant too. apparently later this year they are opening a dedicated magritte museum next door, which sounds amazing. guess that means i'll have to go back again soon!