Ghent

Or as I like to call it, "Meh," Belgium.

Many people highly recommended Ghent, as a place with historic sites like Bruges but with a more vibrant "living city" of students, etc.  Or so they said.  We had one day to find out.

I guess there were nice cathedrals in among the large, generic and boring pedestrian shopping streets.

There were some scenic canals with brownish water & touristy boat tours.

There were even cafes with decent views and fine beer.

We even found a coffee shop that served amazing coffee.

Hotel: nice on the outside, your great-grandmother's basement on the inside

But somehow Ghent let us down.  We didn't run into any boulevards or any reasonable amount of truly comfortable, usable public space.  The very touristy downtown was even busier than Bruges, but lacked the charm.  It was a maze of uniformity and sameness.  And on relatively short notice, we couldn't book a room that was reasonably priced and/or seemed at all interesting, so we ended up at a former monastery/now a cheap hotel.  Sounds interesting, right?  Wrong.  There's no monastery left - it's just a cheap rooming house whose rooms haven't been updated since the 1920s - most expensive stay of our trip to date, and by far the worst.

Let's see, is there ANYTHING interesting to do here?

Maybe Ghent would have been better with a local to show us around, or with something more interesting to see and do.  But it wasn't.  However, the next two days were in Antwerp, which very pleasantly surprised us with how great it is.