Ghent was our second stop on this bus tour. Many people told me I should visit Ghent when I am in Belgium next time, and that’s what we did. Now I know that a couple of hours is not enough, and I hope that sometime in my next life, I will be able to come to Belgium at a minimum for a week and spend more time in each of the cities visiting all the castles and museums.

Ghent is amazing and impossibly charming, even in the weather like it was!

It was our second time in Belgium, and so far, Belgium was good to us. When we were there for the first time in 2015, it was summer, and the weather was beautiful. We had a great tour guide, Mik, with whom we went for a three-hour walking tour of Brussels and then went for a one-day trip to Brugge. I remember how Mik was walking very fast, and some of the people in the group complained, but Boris and I were happy that it was the right speed for us. That was before my back problems started, and then for many years, I was thinking about this trip as “how I want things to be” – I wanted to be able to explore a city on foot again and to be able to walk as long as I want. In this respect, I “closed the circle” – we walked a lot, and nothing hurt.

This time, we took a one-day bus trip to Antwerp and Ghent, and It exceeded expectations. First, when I asked Boris whether he wanted to go on a day trip, he said he didn’t mind but expected that we would be on the bus for most of the day with some stops and a little bit of walking, but it ended up being a lot of walking! I was a little bit suspicious when they put both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking groups on one bus, so during the ride, the tour guides switched, and in each of the cities, we went on separate walking tours. It felt like too much of “optimization,” but fortunately, I was wrong.

Our tour guide, Marko, started by commenting on people taking pictures before even knowing what is in front of them, and he reminded us that the most important thing is our experience, not the Instagram posts. There is nothing especially new and groundbreaking in this statement, but somehow this changed my reception mode, and I took way less pictures than I usually do. He told us a lot of interesting facts (some of them didn’t seem true for me, and I searched for more information; some were completely new, and I also searched for more information, overall, a lot of bookmarks are sitting there waiting for more research to be done). Although he was entertaining, he was not one of these joke-telling-tereotypes-promoting tour guides, he knew in-depth what he was talking about.

Antwerp

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