We Whent To Ghent

There comes a point in the life of every expat when the supply of local tourist activities is exhausted. Thus, last weekend we were forced to broaden our horizons with a trip to Ghent, accompanied by our visitors from Londres. The walk from the station excepted, the town is rather pretty, without the hordes of tourists that are the scourge of Bruges’ streets.

That said, Ghent didn’t offer that much new, given that Belgian city breaks can be reduced to the following formula:

FlemishCity = GroteMarkt + Churches + River

At least we can say that we’ve now been to Belgium’s four largest cities. In fact, we’ve been to Antwerp twice now, having popped back yesterday for a shopping trip (we'd foolishly visited on a Sunday the last time we went, only to find everything closed). We found that Antwerp’s clothes shops resemble nightclubs more than they do your average Gap – pounding bass and strobe lighting to match. The only downside is that the shop assistants will come and chat to you in Dutch. The solution we found, was to ignore them and rummage busily in the nearest pile of clothes