Antwerp and Ghent (Gent? Ghent? The "h" in G(h)ent is arguably the most confusing aspect of the entire town) were amazing. We saw a lot of big impressive buildings.
(This is The Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, a building that is both big and impressive - and unfinished! The second tower was never completed, which makes me feel better about the fact that I have never finished a jigsaw puzzle in my life.)
We went into the former house of Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens and saw a tiny, tiny, bed that mimicked what he may have slept in.
(People in the late 1500s thought that it was better to sleep sitting up, which is why their beds were so small. Idiots!)
I ate a really expensive waffle.
I took too many pictures of said waffle.
We saw a man in a bear suit being addressed inside his suit by a man in normal, not-bear-suit, street attire.
These things were all great and fun and took place inside cities that we had planned to visit. Yet, thanks to some miscommunication on the Airbnb website, we were forced into spending about 14 hours in the city of Zele.
Maybe we visited Zele at the wrong time, or on the wrong day. Maybe it's usually bustling with life and it smells like a town and not like an abandoned sulfur dispensary.
At this point you may have come to the conclusion that our Zele experience was not a good one and you would be right in that assumption. It was mostly due to our own incompetence that we landed ourselves in the middle of a sleepy rural Belgian town, but it's much easier to blame the town and not the people who ended up in the town, considering towns can't defend themselves because they are not animate beings capable of speech. Sorry, Zele.
That being said - the Zele that we entered was a maze of scarily similar brick houses that looked like they were inhabited by ghosts. The kind of town where the only people who pass on the street are solo grandmas on bicycles and middle-aged men in vans. The kind of town where people have topiaries that look like this:
However, the people we talked to in Zele were some of the kindest I have ever met. I guess if you live in a place that looks like the real life set of Edward Scissorhands you just gotta have a positive outlook.
Instead of kicking us out of her home after realizing us nasty millennials had tried to sneak two extra people into her Airbnb, our host kindly offered to let the extras stay in their camper van. This was the first (and hopefully, last) time I was excited to hear that I would be sleeping in a camper van.
The van looked like this:
(Truly a vision with the pale blue color scheme and tasteful dolphin imagery)
It also had this sign on the window:
(This translates to "I watch for my boss," a surprisingly threatening thing for a Scottish Terrier to proclaim.)
If you can't eat gluten in the town of Zele and you arrive at a late night burger and fries restaurant that doesn't serve anything that hasn't touched gluten (this wasn't my personal situation but the situation of one of our group members) the owner of the restaurant will feel so bad she will offer you the paté that SHE was going to have for DINNER. She will offer you this FOR FREE. That is how nice the people of Zele are.
In all, the trip was great even given the confusing 14 hours in Zele. I'll leave you with a picture I took of a portrait in the Rubens museum. This is probably a really important historical figure and all things considered I probably should have figured out, at the very least, his name. If I'm being honest I only took this picture because I thought his mustache looked funny.
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