Adventure Time!: Day Fifty-Two: Belgium sightseeing

This morning I didn't wake up until 11am! I think that is basically the latest I have slept this whole time. I went and got us some coffee and pastries for breakfast from the petrol station (which has a cafe inside) but I didn't know what I was getting since it is in Dutch. It turned out that one pastry was filled with cheese and one had a sausage inside. The cheese one was better but the sausage was pretty good too. We had them with some mayo (called fritesauce here because they always put it on their frites), some curry ketchup (which was actually really yum) and some mustard which was just normal. Good breakfast.

After that we got on the way to Antwerp which was about an hour away from where we had stopped. It didn't seem like that big of a city even though it is the second biggest in Belgium but maybe it was just because of the area we were in. There are some really awesome old buildings there, and a massive cathedral which is really cool too. We were going to go in but didn't have any cash at that point so we had to go find an ATM. It seemed like there was some kind of festival going on because we saw a parade of people all dressed up in old timey clothes and they had some guys setting up to do archery in the square and there were heaps of musicians around as well.

After we walked around the town for awhile we found an ATM so we went to get lunch. We went to a kebab place and got a mixed plate to share which came with chicken, beef, kebab meat, chips, salad, corn and sauce. It was probably the first time we had eaten proper meat (ie not McDonalds or sausage or something) in years. It was yum but I don't think I will miss it when we go back to being veges. I am actually looking forward to it! After lunch we walked through a bit more of the town and found an awesome shop with all different kinds of beer so we went in and got some so we can try them later. We got 4 kinds and two are ones which are brewed by monks, awesome.

Now we are on our way to Ghent which is apparently a cool old medieval town. When we got to Ghent we were really confused because heaps of streets were blocked off and we couldn't get around very well. We found a park and walked into the centre and then we realised that we were in the middle of a massive festival/fair of some kind, it was crazy. They had heaps of food and drink stalls (even one with Jacobs Creek wine) and heaps of performances going on. They had stages with bands and also street performers. There were a bunch of people dressed up like monkeys in a cage and one got out and ran away and was chased by people dressed as cops.

Anyway we had a good look around there, it seemed like it would be a really cool thing to go to if you were staying around there, I think it would have gone on all night. But all the things like the churches and castles and stuff which we would have otherwise looked at were closed. Oh well. We also saw probably the first vegetarian food stalls we had seen on this trip! Too bad we weren't hungry. After Ghent we planned to find somewhere close to stay but it turned out that Bruges (tomorrow's destination) wasn't that far away so we ended up staying near there.