I snuck into Ghent¹ over the weekend. I had friends living there I wanted to catch up with, and spent a long weekend tromping around the city and hanging out with them. I’m only here for the weekend before returning to the Netherlands. If you’re in Belgium for less than 48 hours you don’t need to fill out a Passenger Location Form or deal with some other annoying bits of COVID bureaucracy, which sounded like a good deal to me.

Of course, it’s not altogether clear how they would know if I were staying beyond the 48 hours; there’s no border checks. And I did really want to spend an extra couple days at least checking out Antwerp, if nowhere else. I may be back in the autumn or winter, if the pandemic hasn’t necessitated another round of lockdowns and restrictions.

For the moment, things are open again. It’s maybe a little slower than usual, since we’re in the middle of the vacation season, but you wouldn’t know that from the crowds filling the restaurants and mobbing the castle.² I toured the castle and several museums and even saw a show in the theater,³ and with the exception of the theater and public transport and waitstaff very few people are wearing masks any more.⁴

Ghent is compact — you can walk across the city center in about 15 minutes — but it’s got 250,000 inhabitants. It doesn’t seem that way.⁵ The city’s an interesting mix of modern construction mixed with a lot of old medieval architecture. Some cities with a lot of preserved architecture can come across as museum pieces⁶ but that’s not true of Ghent. It manages to bridge the old and the new rather elegantly⁷ although there are some jarring exceptions.⁸

So all in all, it made a pleasant backdrop to a weekend with friends. There was a lot of hanging out in the shade and having beers and frites, or sitting in a quiet, quirky cocktail bar and drinking odd concoctions with shiitake-infused vodka and saline solution.⁹

I got a lot out of the 48 hours I spent, but it was over all too quickly. I caught the train out this morning. I’m back in the Netherlands for the week, and preparing to head further afield from there. There’s a lot I didn’t get to see in Ghent, and a lot more beyond that in Belgium. I’ll need to find a way to get back.

Next: Amsterdam (AMS) to Copenhagen (CPH)
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Footnotes

¹ I say “snuck” but as far as I know I’ve followed all the applicable rules and procedures.

² Castle Gravensteen, a castle dating back to 1180, sits in the middle of Ghent and is open to tourists. Of which there are a lot.

³ Familie, a cheery show in which a family of four decides to reenact the final hours of another family of four who all committed suicide in 2007 in Calais. The characters are played by a real-life family — the parents, two teenage daughters, and their dogs — so there’s a lot of uncomfortable doubling going on; you’re never quite sure if someone is talking as if they were one of the original real-life family who committed suicide, or as one of the fictional family members reenacting it, or as a member of the cast talking directly to the audience.

It was in Dutch with simultaneous translations projected onto a screen in English and French, and was very well-produced and well-acted. And although it was originally performed in January, 2020, the themes it explored — about suffocating within a claustrophobic structure but being terrified to fully break free — are obviously extremely resonant right now. But I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. It was deeply unsettling. I’m going to need to think about it for a good, long while before I really know how I feel.

⁴ My friends and I did. But we were often the only people doing so.

⁵ I get the sense there’s a lot of housing around the outskirts of the city; there certainly aren’t any skyscrapers where that number of people would be living.

⁶ Like, say, Bruges.

⁷ Both SMAK (the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, featuring art from the past 50 years, and often from the past 10) and the Museum of Fine Arts (featuring art from the millenium leading up to that) sit opposite one another, and you can buy a combo-ticket to both and see them one after the other.

⁸ The restaurant there is a O’Tacos, which is a French fast food chain selling what they claim are tacos but are in reality meat and cheese wrapped in a flour tortilla, pressed in a sandwich press, then folded up. It resembles no sort of food you’re familiar with except maybe a cheap grocery store wrap that’s been left sitting in the sun and is generally regarded as inedible by anyone who’s ever eaten anything else.

⁹ Both in a drink called a Parchment from The Cobbler, along with jenever and sherry and Benedictine and a spray of single malt.