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Gent, our guidebook said, might be a better choice than Bruges, offering similarly pretty scenery but without quite as many tourists. As we've done both at this point, I beg to differ on that opinion. Part of our disappointment with Gent was certainly that it, like so many places at this time, was readying for a summer festival - meaning absolutely the whole town was covered in construction, rendering it anything but attractive. We have not one single nice photograph of the place as there was no angle you could shoot it at to avoid the heavy equipment, cranes, rubble, and scaffolding. Well, Mico did manage to get part of one building.
Our B&B there, on the other hand, was one of the best - a large apartment in a historic, high ceilinged building, with kitchenette, and private terrace. The hosts were, again, a delight (with something like a 20 year age gap between them, and a marriage 26 years strong, they still seemed as in love as, well, a couple of newlyweds - to quote her, "he was the first, and he still is"). Upon hearing it was our honeymoon she ran off to fetch us a very nice bottle of wine for our dinner, and to top it all off, while we were out the next day seeing the sights, she actually folded our laundry which I had earlier washed and hung out to dry! In the morning, a full breakfast was delivered to our suite and left outside our door. Our hostess, the one doing all the work, was a mother who looked after her son with the same doting attention: at one point while we were chatting outside, the son interrupted by rapping upon the window two floors above as a cue he wanted his lunch served. Understandable perhaps if the son was nine; he was, however, 19!
In the marketplace in Gent we also had the opportunity to try some local food specialties - again by asking the people standing around us we got some helpful advice on what to choose. It ended up being matjes (herring, "with onion", as I was told to request), and grey shrimp (specific to this region) salad. Some wonderful local cheese and a baguette from the bakery completed our picnic.
Not much else to be said - those were the highlights for us. We were looking forward to moving on to Bruges.
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