Luck Runs Out

Mom tried to take an inspirational photo of me biking.
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Mom and I woke up early to cycle the 43 kilometers to Gent.

Since we were in a new country, the bike paths all but disappeared.  Mom and I found ourselves riding on run-down shoulders through towns that were not nearly as cute as in the Netherlands.  Dingier, more industrial.  You could also see evidence of how hard WWII hit the area since most buildings were either built or restores in the fifties. We also encountered our first hill - more of an incline really, but a hill compared with the flatness of the past week.

This is actually one of our last canals.
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Gent was our first real city since Amsterdam. Our hostel was in the hipper, medieval part of town, near one of the two main canals and the Castle of the Counts. Immediately we headed for one of the boat tours, since we had enjoyed the one of Bruges so much. We then wandered around the churches and state house, looking at the art work and reading Latin inscriptions inside.

Our trip to the post office was hell.  We didn't understand how to send a package, how to wait in line, how to buy stamps, where to go when our number was called, which one of us should take responsibility for the package, or how much the package would cost.  Our first fight!

Canal boats in Gent.
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The rest of day was spent wandering in museums and on the city streets, most notably the Flemish culture museum.  This is the museum that reenforced just how much I want to go to grad school for museum studies because it was so poorly organized and uninformative, that's the kind of thing I want to work with and change. Anyway.  We also found the pictures/postcards of the parents buying their babies at the cabbage patch or babies hatching out of eggs on the farm.  (Does anyone have background info on this myth? I tried googling combinations of baby, Victorian, myth, egg, farm, cabbage patch, stork, Belgian, and Flemish but found nothing.)

Another view of the medieval part of the city.
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Sick of long, expensive meals, Mom and I went on a hunt for a cheap and fast meal.  Buying escargot from a street vendor, we searched until we found an Australian sandwich shop, and I had something with anchovies that was delicious. The sun set as we walked back to the hostel for the night.