For the first time on this trip, I got somewhere by car yesterday. I met an Australian couple yesterday morning, started chatting with them, and was offered a ride to the city center of Ghent when we discovered that we were going to the same place. I did not see as much of the Belgian countryside yesterday morning, but I have grown more interested in visiting Australia and saved a few Euros. I also enjoyed walking around the center of Ghent with John and Louise, my new companions, until we reached the tourist office and parted ways so that I could leave my luggage at my hostel.
Rouen can take a seat: Ghent is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen. Its city center appears to be composed almost exclusively of the type of brick homes that I saw in Ypres yesterday: they have triangular roofs, multicolored facades, and little attics with windows sticking out of their roofs, and they all look older than the Stone Age. Walking through Ghent is a little like being in a fairy tale: it is so beautiful that it does not seem real. Fewer people smoke here than in France, there are far few cars, and there is less of the "rah-rah, we are great" architecture and atmosphere here than in France. Perhaps that is because Belgium has historically been too small a nation for a warlike or colonizing culture to develop here; perhaps it feels less self-aggrandizing than France perforce.
The churches here bespeak of extraordinary wealth. I know that Belgium has historically been a trade center and that it used to make a lot of cloth, as evidenced by the cloth hall in Ypres; whatever the case, it grew filthy rich in the Middle Ages. Its cathedrals are full of marble, statues, paintings, ornamental staircases leading nowhere, and all sorts of little architectural details -- representations of people, bits of statuary sticking out of supporting columns, tiny, sideways spires -- that solve no purpose beyond ornamentation. One comes to feel, in one of these cathedrals, that they are partly a celebration of beauty; while every painting that I have ever seen in a church has been derivative in style, church interiors here are designed in such a way as to be very aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps the most available outlet for the energies of artistically-inclined people in the Middle Ages was to try to make religious buildings as beautiful as possible.
The stained glass here is the best that I have ever seen. While the depictions of most stained glass are hard to make out, these are as clear as day, showing scenes of human interaction that are as beautiful as good paintings. I have discovered both that stained glass windows can be opened, which seems like cheating to me (to air out churches on hot days), and that the parts of stained glass that depict human scenes and the parts of them that merely provide color are clearly demarcated on one and the same window in Belgium, which I had not seen before.
Stop me if I have mentioned this before, but men and women have very clear, distinct roles in classical statuary: men are statesmen, warriors, or thinkers, while women are nymphs or bearers of children. I forgot to mention that the cathedral in Ypres had extensive representations of the 1383 siege by the English, during which the city's citizens prayed to some saint or other to protect them. The Belgians' (former?) piety reminds me of that portrayed by Aeschylus; it seems that the ancient Greeks and medieval Belgians alike attributed most of their triumphs and defeats to gods rather than ascribing them to human agency.
The Belgians know their food. At a fruit and vegetable market the other day, I bought almost two pounds of very fresh fruit (cherries and grapes -- the raspberries were too expensive, and the strawberries looked so-so) for four Euros, which, while not a great price, is much better than what I would have paid in France (for worse fruit). I also bought more food at a bakery (most of it savory) for five Euros, meaning that I paid nine Euros for two lunches here. I got dinner at a nearby restaurant for something like 11.50 Euros -- but I am now speaking only of prices and forgetting to tell you what it was. My dinner was a phenomenal meatloaf dish that came with mashed potatoes and steamed green beans -- the Belgians are not prejudiced against vegetables! I do not know if meatloaf is very high-quality meat, but it was incredibly tender, marinated as it was in a gravy that tasted heavily of black pepper. I plan to return to the same restaurant tonight to try the dish that my companion for the evening had, a veal stew, as I am not going to eat out at all in Brussels, where I have decided that I would do better to make my own dinners.
The last note, the one about my companion, is a little vexatious. I met someone in my hostel who asked if he could join me for dinner, and I did not have it in me to refuse. The fellow was a Malaysian computer scientist returning home after three years in Sheffield, and, while he was plenty interesting to talk to and I would have liked him in pretty much any other setting, I would rather have had dinner on my own than with him. Again, I discovered that I took in less of my surroundings and felt less immersed in the surrounding culture when I was with another person. I brushed off his invitation to join him on his trip to Bruges today, as I had to write this email, which I might have been able to write yesterday if I had been able to eat more quickly, and do not know if I will see him for dinner tonight. Perhaps such interactions are a workplace hazard of staying in hostels and are not so bad after all, as we would wither if we did not interact at all.
Oops! I forgot to describe the belfry that I climbed (for more money than I would have liked -- I am not going to climb any more cathedrals or towers in Belgium except, perhaps, in Antwerp). It had a long and interesting history dating from the fourteenth-century; people had lived there at one point, and its passages were so narrow that a stouter man than I would not have been able to fit through them at all. The belfry offered a 360-degree view of Ghent somewhat near its top, and it even had a passage leading higher up, but a schoolmaster told me that tourists were not allowed up there when I tried to follow his students up. The city of Ghent is unwittingly awaiting my lawsuits on the grounds of ageism, sexual discrimination, and unfair treatment of people from another country.
Rouen can take a seat: Ghent is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen. Its city center appears to be composed almost exclusively of the type of brick homes that I saw in Ypres yesterday: they have triangular roofs, multicolored facades, and little attics with windows sticking out of their roofs, and they all look older than the Stone Age. Walking through Ghent is a little like being in a fairy tale: it is so beautiful that it does not seem real. Fewer people smoke here than in France, there are far few cars, and there is less of the "rah-rah, we are great" architecture and atmosphere here than in France. Perhaps that is because Belgium has historically been too small a nation for a warlike or colonizing culture to develop here; perhaps it feels less self-aggrandizing than France perforce.
The churches here bespeak of extraordinary wealth. I know that Belgium has historically been a trade center and that it used to make a lot of cloth, as evidenced by the cloth hall in Ypres; whatever the case, it grew filthy rich in the Middle Ages. Its cathedrals are full of marble, statues, paintings, ornamental staircases leading nowhere, and all sorts of little architectural details -- representations of people, bits of statuary sticking out of supporting columns, tiny, sideways spires -- that solve no purpose beyond ornamentation. One comes to feel, in one of these cathedrals, that they are partly a celebration of beauty; while every painting that I have ever seen in a church has been derivative in style, church interiors here are designed in such a way as to be very aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps the most available outlet for the energies of artistically-inclined people in the Middle Ages was to try to make religious buildings as beautiful as possible.
The stained glass here is the best that I have ever seen. While the depictions of most stained glass are hard to make out, these are as clear as day, showing scenes of human interaction that are as beautiful as good paintings. I have discovered both that stained glass windows can be opened, which seems like cheating to me (to air out churches on hot days), and that the parts of stained glass that depict human scenes and the parts of them that merely provide color are clearly demarcated on one and the same window in Belgium, which I had not seen before.
Stop me if I have mentioned this before, but men and women have very clear, distinct roles in classical statuary: men are statesmen, warriors, or thinkers, while women are nymphs or bearers of children. I forgot to mention that the cathedral in Ypres had extensive representations of the 1383 siege by the English, during which the city's citizens prayed to some saint or other to protect them. The Belgians' (former?) piety reminds me of that portrayed by Aeschylus; it seems that the ancient Greeks and medieval Belgians alike attributed most of their triumphs and defeats to gods rather than ascribing them to human agency.
The Belgians know their food. At a fruit and vegetable market the other day, I bought almost two pounds of very fresh fruit (cherries and grapes -- the raspberries were too expensive, and the strawberries looked so-so) for four Euros, which, while not a great price, is much better than what I would have paid in France (for worse fruit). I also bought more food at a bakery (most of it savory) for five Euros, meaning that I paid nine Euros for two lunches here. I got dinner at a nearby restaurant for something like 11.50 Euros -- but I am now speaking only of prices and forgetting to tell you what it was. My dinner was a phenomenal meatloaf dish that came with mashed potatoes and steamed green beans -- the Belgians are not prejudiced against vegetables! I do not know if meatloaf is very high-quality meat, but it was incredibly tender, marinated as it was in a gravy that tasted heavily of black pepper. I plan to return to the same restaurant tonight to try the dish that my companion for the evening had, a veal stew, as I am not going to eat out at all in Brussels, where I have decided that I would do better to make my own dinners.
The last note, the one about my companion, is a little vexatious. I met someone in my hostel who asked if he could join me for dinner, and I did not have it in me to refuse. The fellow was a Malaysian computer scientist returning home after three years in Sheffield, and, while he was plenty interesting to talk to and I would have liked him in pretty much any other setting, I would rather have had dinner on my own than with him. Again, I discovered that I took in less of my surroundings and felt less immersed in the surrounding culture when I was with another person. I brushed off his invitation to join him on his trip to Bruges today, as I had to write this email, which I might have been able to write yesterday if I had been able to eat more quickly, and do not know if I will see him for dinner tonight. Perhaps such interactions are a workplace hazard of staying in hostels and are not so bad after all, as we would wither if we did not interact at all.
Oops! I forgot to describe the belfry that I climbed (for more money than I would have liked -- I am not going to climb any more cathedrals or towers in Belgium except, perhaps, in Antwerp). It had a long and interesting history dating from the fourteenth-century; people had lived there at one point, and its passages were so narrow that a stouter man than I would not have been able to fit through them at all. The belfry offered a 360-degree view of Ghent somewhat near its top, and it even had a passage leading higher up, but a schoolmaster told me that tourists were not allowed up there when I tried to follow his students up. The city of Ghent is unwittingly awaiting my lawsuits on the grounds of ageism, sexual discrimination, and unfair treatment of people from another country.
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| This was the view from the window of my room. |
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