August 9, 2015

In Belgium, we decided to get a little off the beaten path and skip Brussels and visit Gent instead.  This turned out to be a great decision!  We made it to the city from Amsterdam in just a few hours with one quick train change.  Immediately when we arrived to the city, we were impressed.  The town itself is decent sized, but it still looks like the old town that you would imagine surrounding a medieval castle.  We set up camp for the night, then came in the next morning to spend the day walking around.  My three main goals for the city were waffles, chocolate, and the castle…mission accomplished!

Coming into the castle, it feels like you are walking into the original castle, (even though quite a bit of restoration work has been done).  The castle itself was built in 1180, so they have had to repair quite a bit of it.  It was actually set to be demolished in the 1800’s, but the town purchased it and took on the task of renovating.  They tried to keep it pretty much as it would have looked and the inside is basically a museum with lots of weapons.

You can walk all through the castle all the way up to the top onto the roof.  From up here, there is a great view of the city.  We hung out up here for a while before we went back down to the rest of the museum areas.

One of the coolest (although very gruesome parts) was the torcher museum.  They had the original guillotine that was used in the castle along with quite a few other torcher instruments.  Holy cow, those guys sure knew how to cause pain!  I would not have wanted to be in trouble back then.

The last part of the castle was the basement which was renovated to look like it would have back when the castle was active.  It was pretty creepy.  At one time, it was used to house the horses, but at some point in history, they used it as another torcher room.  The well that you can see below was a regular water well, but they also used it to basically drown people as a method of torcher.

The town itself was great, super cute town square and great shops.  We did find a chocolate shop…how could we possibly go to Belgium without getting Belgian Chocolate?!

In the town, right in the town square is St Nicholas’ Church…wow, talk about a beautiful church!  It was amazing from the outside and even cooler on the inside.  We were able to go all through the inside, including the crypts.  It was pretty cool.

Last, but certainly not least, we found the BEST Belgium Waffles in the country!  Seriously, they were amazing.  I don’t know what they do to make the batter, but I am totally going to try and duplicate the recipe when we get home.  They were so good!!

We are leaving here tomorrow and our next stop is to Cologne, Germany.  From there we are going to travel through the SW part of Germany and see lots more castles!!