Ghent Was the Most Beautiful / Europe Trip Recap 7 / 2016, Feb 3–Feb 4 / Belgium Travelogue #2

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These are photos of the interior of Ghent station. I really loved this city. Even now, going to this city was by chance, but I have nothing but memories of it being a jackpot. Spending the first day in Brussels in 'disappointment' and then going to Ghent was somewhat unplanned. Because I'd planned my Europe trip before going back to Korea under the 'plan' of visiting cities along the travel route, a 'visit not intended' like this was a choice that could have caused a lot of agonizing. But arriving at the station, coming down to the underground and exiting the station building, this worry began to disappear. As with most European 'train stations' (limited to the fairly large cities..), you can get a feel for whether a place is worth traveling just by visiting the train station, and for this city I got a feel for it. And a 'good feeling' at that. This station is one where intercity trains mainly stop, and within Belgium it's a junction station, so quite a lot of trains run through it. There are trains departing from Brussels and going to Bruges, plus other lines, so this station was really, really crowded with people.

The way to get to Ghent: I bought a 5-euro student ticket and went. Even if you can't speak English, you can read 'student,' so go to the ticket machine, press the English language option, and buy the 5-euro one-pass ticket or whatever it is. In Belgium you can go anywhere one-way with that ticket. (The price is fixed at 5 euros..)

Well, originally those structures in front of the station wouldn't have been there, but they were built to provide shelter from rain, so they slightly spoil the 'station scenery' but I liked them because they're practical. On top of that, this day, for some reason, showed 'clear weather' different from the day before, so I figured I'd struck gold and started walking around.

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To get to downtown Ghent you can use the 'tram.' If you buy a one-day tram pass and just get around, you can travel a bit more widely. As you wander around downtown Ghent there may be various places you want to go a bit more, and the 'tram' solves that. In my case I wanted to visit the library, and since it took a bit more time to get to the library, buying a one-day 'tram' ticket was helpful. The photos above are photos of downtown Ghent taken when I went in the morning. A small river flows through the city, and around this river there are restaurants and residential complexes and such.

Of course, because the city isn't large it's also walkable, but still you have to walk a long way from the station to the city center, and the season I traveled was 'winter,' so I gave up on walking early on. My shoes were also walkers (?) that come up to just below the ankle—anyway, boots—so walking for a long time was hard too. (Of course, despite that, in Paris I walked about 5 hours a day in them..)

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I really love going to cathedrals, and besides, there's nowhere with as many cathedrals as Europe..One curious thing is that, while most cathedrals in Korea tend to have integrated wooden chair + kneeler units (this is the same as churches..), here they almost all just have a chair, plain and simple. And those chairs are very often plastic chairs, and rarely, in 'Notre-Dame Cathedral' there were chairs made of wood. When you go to very old cathedrals where few people tread, you'd see old-style chairs. I remember the old cathedral I went to in Bremen was like that.. In any case, stained glass and pipe organs, an enormous spire and clock are common features of most cathedrals..seeing those things really brought peace to my heart. Going in everywhere I could, making the sign of the cross, sitting down and meditating for a moment, then coming out—such a schedule was a 'procedure' I duly had to do at any cathedral I could enter. Later on I started paying money, buying a candle, lighting it, and then coming out.

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One of the 'personal goals' I set while traveling Europe was to go into a library. Because it seemed I could gauge the class of a city, of a country, just by looking at this 'library.' There's no developed country whose libraries are undeveloped. When libraries increase, that area has become a city with great 'development potential.' I remember being amazed before, in London too, confirming that there were libraries everywhere—seeing a library standing right in front of Victoria Coach Station, and a library standing right behind the National Gallery, makes me feel it's a shame that Korea still doesn't have that many libraries. Of course, it's true there's a library if you go up the hill on the Hongdae street too, but that doesn't make libraries a universal space.

I'm not sure whether I saw it in a documentary or read it in a book, but they said that if there's one library per ten thousand people, that city is a place with truly many libraries..When there's a library, inside there are plenty of spaces to read books, even if not for children to run around. There are lots of chairs too..In the case of that library, there were more chairs for 'books' than for studying. Lots of kids too..The city has a population of only 100,000, a small city, but there were tremendously many people walking around (probably because the city's basic income per capita is high, so people walking around + tourists..), and seeing that there were quite a lot of people in the library too, Belgium really must be well-off..

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Lastly, a photo of the city center.. What more needs to be said about this city.. It remains in memory as a truly comfortable and enjoyable city. If I were told to go to Belgium again, Brussels I'd just pass through, and I'd go to Ghent and Bruges. Europe is definitely a place where the charm of 'small cities' is alive. It'd be nice if Korea also had many places where the charm of small cities is alive, but when you go to a small city, there are still more inconveniences, and the cityscape of each city has a similar image, and there's a lot of the sorrow of the scenery changing once a place becomes famous and crowds increase (like Jeonju..), so I think some adjustment of strong and weak is needed..

For reference, I didn't eat things like waffles. I'd just eat cake instead..No, with cake that cheap, I don't understand why anyone eats waffles. Waffles are actually more expensive..

Ghent, which I miss, a city I want to go to again.