Ghent by Day

14 January 2014

It was raining hard enough to soak our shoes this morning.  Our hopes were not high for good pictures today.  

We spent a while in Saint Bavo Cathedral (which I keep reading as Saint Bravo, and why not?), which houses a storied altarpiece.  It's a cavernous, musty place.  I watched a cleaner in the distance and it was all CSN&Y's "Cathedral" from there.

The reason we're in Ghent is that Jack was invited to give a talk at Ghent University.  We met Sandro and a subset of his nine PhD students for lunch, which went long and ended with a tray of sweets.  "You have to try these," they said.  "They're a Ghent specialty called cuberdon.  We also call them 'noses.' They're very sweet."

Think of the consistency of a candy corn with the intense flavor of raspberry, and with a gooey raspberry filling inside.  One of these babies and you won't be hungry again for hours.  "I have to bring home some of these," I said.

Jack's 2:00 p.m. talk didn't start until 3:00.  Nobody appeared bothered by this.  Besides Jack and Sandro, and me on the sidelines, there were seven PhD students.  Sandro walked with us back into the center of town around 4:30.  "You have half an hour of light left," he said, after leading us to a chocolate shop for gift boxes and depositing us in front of the town's nose cart.  

After securing enough cuberdons to feed the lab and a handful of hungry bikers, we walked back to the bridge to get the pictures I've been aiming for since last night.

When we walked back over the bridge, the heron was still there.  I aimed for his reflection this time.

We were walking in the direction of noses, so I took some pictures while Jack bought us a warm Belgian waffle.

Then we went into a pen shop because pen shop.

We only had a few more minutes before it was too dark for decent pictures.

"I wonder," I said to Jack, after taking this picture:

"If Starbucks is as annoying to Europeans as it is to Americans."

Jack said, "It's not annoying to most Americans."

Sigh.  I admit I like their coffee too, but I only go to Starbucks under duress.

"The moose shop is open!"  Jack said, gesturing towards the chocolatier we'd spotted yesterday.  Sadly, the shopkeeper told us that she had no more of these, and this one had spent too much time out in the open to be edible:

As for the small, tan moose in the window display, there is no story behind him.  "No story, just a display," the shopkeeper said.  "It comes down tomorrow."

Tomorrow morning we board a train to Antwerp and change there for a train to Amsterdam.