James's Visit in Belgium!!

Hi there!! It's finally time!! Here it is!!! The blog post written by James about his week and a bit in Belgium with me from November 2023 !! Enjoy!!!

Day 1: Arrival in Brussels

• After a long flight and an early morning landing I wandered out of the airport expecting to hop on a train to downtown Brussels, but when the exit doors opened, guess who was standing there?! Katie surprised me at the airport, with a sign and everything!

  A note from Katie: as James wasn't expecting me at the airport, he was taking his sweet time to make his way out. To the point where I was scared that I had already missed him!! Also arriving at the same time as James' flight was a flight carrying hundreds of Orthodox Jews so it was easy to spot James as he was the only one without the flat top hat and curls.

• After a long hug and lots of catching up, we jumped on the train into the city and began exploring, I got to see my first European square and some impressive cathedrals, from the front and the back door!

• Katie then took me to a cool food collective where there were a bunch of booths with different cuisines, we decided to go with Vietnamese and got some Pho along with another dish (that we can't remember the name of, oops). We each had a tasty Belgian beer and even got to take photos in a photo booth!

• We then went to see "the man who piss", (actually called manneken pis) a very famous Belgian statue.

• We then boarded the train to Gent and off we went! We had a 30-minute walk to Katie’s apartment so I got to see the first bits of Gent, including the canals and some tiny European houses.

• We then unloaded my bags at Katie’s apartment, I got to see the layout and the beautiful view of the barbed wire on the prison outside her window...

• Then we headed out for a walk to tour Gent campus for the first time! It was raining and dark but the campus (from what I could tell) looked very nice! After a brief tour, we called it a night, we headed home to eat some charcuterie and pop a bottle of champagne! Woohoo the Europe adventure is finally here!

Day 2: Paris

• We woke up early in the morning and headed to the train station, the plan for the day was to head to Paris and check it out.

• We took a train from Gent to Brussels and then hopped on the SPEEDY train to Paris, it only took 2 hours to get there, we made sure to spray down our seats and do a good check for bedbugs before sitting down!

• When we got to Paris we took in the sights and decided to find a restaurant with both of our favourite foods: sandwiches! We ended up in a nice little cafe where we got a classic ham n' cheese and a Mexican sandwich which ended up being a burrito on bread! 

• We then took to the city to see more amazing sights, fortunately, our cafe was right beside the Basilica church, so we took it in from the outside but didn’t end up going inside. We then continued on towards the Louvre and the Seine, we spotted the Arc de Triomphe, the monument signifying Napoleon's victories. We saw the infamous Louvre Pyramid, walked through the Jardin des Tuileries and ended up wandering over to another cafe.

• We sat down at a cafe and decided to split their cheesecake, unfortunately upon the first bite we discovered that they either did things very differently with cheesecake in Paris, or it had gone bad. Between that and the people smoking at the table next to us, this was not the highlight of our Paris adventure!

• Besides the obvious highlights of Paris, we also got to see this tiny car that can park the WRONG WAY!! How cool is that?!

• Ok so maybe the real highlight is, of course, the Eiffel Tower, as we got there when it began to rain, there was quite the tourist racket going on to buy umbrellas from the vendors around the tower, luckily we brought our own!

• We looked at the tower for a few minutes but decided not to go up, the line was quite long! Instead, we opted to have a quiet snack before heading back in the direction of the train station. We found a nice spot across the river from the Eiffel Tower, where we sat on the water's edge and shared a pain au chocolat, the sun was setting, the temperature was perfect, it was amazing. 

• As we walked back to the train station we stopped to look at the menus of various restaurants, finally we decided on one and sat down. There was only one problem, no one came to serve us, so we got up and moved to the restaurant across the corner, where they piled us on their patio into a little 2 person table, it was perfect. They brought us bread to start, we ordered some wine, and my favourite part of the meal, I convinced Katie to try the escargot with me. After much resistance and a video on how to eat them correctly she ended up loving them, how could you not? They are covered in delicious garlic butter!

Day 3: Gent Exploration 

• We had made it back late from Paris the night before so in the morning we walked to a cafe and got FREE coffees!

• Then it was onwards to downtown Gent, it is a gorgeous city, with cobblestone streets and medieval-era buildings breaking through the skyline. 

• We then decided to head up the Gent Belfry Tower to get a good view of the city. The way up was either the elevator or the old spiral castle staircase. We opted for the fun option and started our way up the stairs. To give you an idea, these stairs were six inches at their widest, so when we ran into a group of people coming down, it was a tight squeeze to get past. The second group we ran into was 2 old women, one of which was quite rude and had some nasty words for us as she passed, which caught us quite off guard. We only then discovered that the elevator was for the way up and the stairs for the way down……oops. But we made it to the top after quite a few stairs. 

• I also forgot to mention that the tower had a dragon! Which kept watch over the city of Gent. 

• We then headed to the canal, found a nice patio and sat down for a beer, which we followed up with fries and bitteballen at the local “drunk student spot”. 

Day 4: More Gent Exploration 

• Katie headed to class and I headed out to find some breakfast, I found a nice cafe where I got a tasty croissant and a coffee and off I went, I visited some of the churches and saw the large squares. I made it to the chocolate shop where I got a few different tasty treats for myself and Katie. 

• That night we hung out and made some tasty pasta, Katie’s recipe, which is probably not the healthiest pasta in the world but it’s pretty dang good!

• As we ate we watched the Barbie movie, which we decided wasn’t very good…

Day 5: Tuesday

• Katie had no classes this morning so we started the day off right and made pancakes!!

• Then Katie headed off to class, and I finally got to doing some schoolwork. 

• That night we decided to go out to eat, after a lot of searching we popped into a brewery for some food, where we got shrimp croquettes…even though we ordered the cheese, they were very good. We then decided we needed to find some cheese croquettes so we bounced to another restaurant and ordered some to split. Finding we were still hungry we ordered dinner and of course a few tasty beers to wash it down with. 

Day 6: Wednesday

• In the morning we went to play tennis, it was a nice walk along one of the Gent canals and it barely even rained!! We got there and got to play for over an hour, we had a blast! On the way home we had decided we were going to bike home, so we rented some Donkey Republics and off we went, Katie was quite nervous but was still killing it and only had one minor tumble as we were looking for an area to park them! She remains unscuffed other than her confidence!

• Later in the afternoon, my cousin Will was arriving to come visit, he’s doing an exchange in Germany so it made it easy to meet up. We went to pick him up at the train station and got some tasty burritos along the way, we found him at the station and headed straight to a boat bar where we had a few beers and caught up. We then walked home and called it for the night!

Day 7: Brugge

• Will’s birthday was this day, so to celebrate we headed to Brugge, an old medieval town in Belgium around a half hour away from Gent. It is beautiful, there are no modern buildings in the town so it truly is a medieval experience. 

• We quickly found a nice brewery and decided to sit down for a beer, we sat outside along the canal and chatted as we drank, on our way out we all used the bathrooms, which surprisingly had goldfish bowl sinks with fish swimming around in them!

• Afterwards, we wandered around for a while taking in the sights, finally, we got peckish so we popped into a second brewery for a snack, unfortunately, their kitchen wasn’t open so instead we made the best of it and had a beer, only when the beers were long empty did we make our way across the street to a small restaurant.

• This is where we had the rudest waiter, we ordered 2 orders of fries and some beers, to which he said “If you weren’t going to order FULL meals then you should have told me, I would not have let you sit down!” and he left in a huff, only to come back a few minutes later and slowly, passive-aggressively remove all the silverware from the table, while the three of us tried to hold in our laughter.

• After our fries were gone we headed back to the brewery and got a real dinner, now that they were open! Whoohoo and the waiter was friendly, what a nice touch. 

• After dinner, we headed back to Gent where Katie went to sleep as she had class in the morning, but Will and I headed out to find a bar to celebrate the rest of his birthday!

Day 8: Gravenstein 

• In the morning Will and I headed out to a cafe around the corner from Katie's to grab sandwiches, we then ate them on campus and waited for Katie to appear. We found her and then she also bought a sandwich, we had a picnic in the light rain and then headed back to the apartment to get ready for tennis!

• The three of us all walked in the rain to tennis, and after getting slightly lost had to backtrack slightly to get to the facility whoops!! We had some fun playing tennis and walked back to the apartment. 

• The main event of the day was the tour of the Gravensteen, a medieval castle from 1180, complete with a dungeon & torture chamber!

• Fun fact the bathrooms were right over the river and the townspeople used to cheer when the royals used the bathroom, the bigger the splash, the bigger the cheer…a very weird piece of history. Perhaps the best part of the castle was the incredible sunset view overtop the skyline of Gent, the other historical buildings from the time rising above the rest.

• After touring the castle we decided it was time for the famous Gent fries that Katie talked so much about, dang these things were good! The double deep frying really pays off, these are way too good not to get once more, makes sense for the birthplace of the fry!

• We ended the night with a few tasty beers, the Disney movie “Turning Red”, ramen & boxed popcorn and a few card games. 

Day 9: Saturday

• It was a rainy morning as we headed to a cute little cafe for brunch, to say it was packed is an understatement, and the door was deceivingly difficult to open… but we accomplished it and luckily someone left as we arrived!! The food here was fantastic and the hot chocolate I ordered was top notch. 

• We then headed partway to the train station and parted ways with Will as he headed off back to Germany. 

• Katie and I then decided we needed to go see if the chocolatiers needed taste testers, we popped into quite a few shops and bought a few chocolates in each, you know it’s going to be good when it’s being made right in front of you. The sculptures in some of the shops were incredible!

• Later on, we got a bit snackish and stopped to once again get some delicious fries, this time we split an order of the flemish stew fries… if you ever go, these are a must-get. Mmm. 

• Finally, we searched for a nice place to have dinner (holy a lot of eating out today!), we decided to get dumplings, something Katie had never tried before!!
  

Day 10: Leaving :(

• A 5:30 am wake-up started the day, we got ready and headed out the door to make it to the train station, as always we kept the trusty umbrella ready as the rain was guaranteed. We got to the train station and got on the train to Brussels, after about 45 minutes we got into the airport. We said a very sad goodbye and waved as I headed through the security line to the gate, Europe trip over, but hopefully the first of many!