Tomorrowland day 3 - Ghent

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Wednesday, July 17, 2019. Today's bus wasn't leaving until 1pm, so with several hours to kill, I decided this would be a good morning to hit up the Atomium. I had totally missed this, and just about everything else in Brussels, the last time I rolled through which was last December. Getting there took awhile, though, because Belgium's S-train is not quite as user-friendly as Germany's S-Bahn. Unlike the S-train I rode to Schaerbeek two days earlier, the ones that were coming through on that morning were not marked in any way, and after taking a quick glance at the timetable, another quick glance at Google Maps, I quickly jumped aboard a train with a final destination south of the city, wrongly thinking it was going through Central and Midi stations. Nope! It was going south in a roundabout way, completely avoiding downtown. I had to hop off at the next stop, and ride another train to Bruxelles-Schuman, a little east of downtown, near some EU buildings.


That's the Berlaymont building, which houses the European Commission--a council which serves as the EU government's executive branch.

So...back in the station I got a subway ticket and rode a couple subway trains until I was finally at a park on the northwest fringe of the city, where I finally found what I was looking for.


So I finally got to see this, but quickly discovered I'd have to come back again some time. You can actually go up inside those big silver balls and look out. But with only an hour and a half left before departure, and part of that time taken up by train rides, I didn't think I'd be able to do this without being rushed, so I decided I'd have to leave and save this for some future trip. Back to the trains...

When I got back to the hostel, I found something waiting for me:


My long-awaited Tomorrowland wristband, which I would need to get into the fest that weekend, was finally here!

The bus left for Ghent at 1pm. Just like yesterday, it was just me and a few others at the beginning, and then the bus filled up after stopping at the hotel downtown, after which we were joined by the second bus.

Like the other two cities on the tour, Ghent is Dutch-speaking. The city's native Dutch name is spelled Gent (I think the reason why we add an H in English is so we don't accidentally pronounce the G like a J) and it's called Gand in French. The first thing we got to do in Ghent was a boat tour. There were several boats for all of us there, and on these boats we were served beer--Gentse Tripel--and cheese.


These boats went up and down several canals throughout the city of Ghent. Our guide pointed out all the historic buildings and some of the stories behind them.


This castle dates from 1180 but those round towers actually date from around the year 1900, when, according to our guide, people had "Disney-ish" ideas of what a castle should look like.

After the boat tour, we walked into the historic city center.

Our guide explained that Ghent peaked in the late Middle Ages. Its golden age ended after Columbus' 1492 discoveries. After that, all the ships hauling treasure back from the Americas mostly parked in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, causing those cities to blow up while Ghent subsequently went on the decline.

He also explained that the city was, at that moment, gearing up for an annual celebration called Gentse Feesten. It would begin that Friday and last ten days. As we looked around the city we could see stages and such being set up for it.

After the downtown tour with all the history, next on the agenda was a dinner buffet prepared for us at an upscale restaurant, Oude Vismijn, with a balcony overlooking the river. And after that, a pub crawl! The first stop on the pub crawl was called Comic Sans. Comic strips and comic books were invented in Belgium, so that's another point of national pride businesses often capitalize on. Not only were the walls covered with comic book artwork, but there were also themed pinball machines like this one.


Up the irons!

The next stop on the pub crawl was called L'enfant terrible, and what I remember most is what I had to go through to get a glass of Chimay. I used up the free beer I was entitled to at this stop, but since they had Chimay available and I had time to drink one, I ordered one. But they would only accept cash and I was out, so I had to run down a few streets just to get to the nearest ATM! Thankfully running isn't something I'm very bad at, so I got my cash and got my Chimay.

After one or two other beer stops we reached the night's final destination, a rather small, inauspicious nightclub (I never caught the name) where we'd be getting a free show from one of the hundred or so Tomorrowland artists. I didn't catch his name so I still don't know who it was. But anyway this is the first time on this trip the feeling started to finally sink in that I was here for something more than some tours around Belgium.


If anyone can ID this artist, I'd love to know who it was.

All of us, about two double-decker busloads of people, doing the Belgian Journey weren't exactly an even cross-section of the thousands attending Tomorrowland. We were mostly yuppies from Europe and North America (including Mexico), i.e. the kind of people who can afford to blow the extra money on the tours. For most of these first two days, I felt like I was at one of those "Expats & Locals" meetups in Stuttgart, talking about where we were from and what we did for work, more than anything else. It was so easy to forget that the reason we were all here was to go to one of the biggest electronic music festivals on the planet. But here at this show on that night in Ghent, for the first time this week we finally got to be the ravers we really were underneath the yuppie exterior. Tomorrowland was almost upon us...

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