Part 2: New Years Eve in Gent

NYE morning started quite miserably for some. I was fine, but I can't say much for the guys. We were all awoken at 8:30 in the morning by Myriam knocking on our door cheerfully calling "good morgennn" - bringing a tray of breakfast for us. She was greeted by ....a  rather unhappy "muh??...good...moor...gen..."

I was feeling fine though and so was Angela mainly and so we got up to eat our giant pile of bread and cheese. Yep, MORE CHEESE. (sorry Erin) Steven joined us shortly after but the fourth of our party stayed in bed. I later learnt there had been some puke-age through the night and later on in the morning too....  That aside, I took a few photos in the kitchen and of the food!

After everyone was up, we went for a very long walk and exploration of the city. I'd somehow managed to crank my neck really badly and so was a little uncomfortable all day and had to constantly resist wanting to look up at buildings or left, or right... and at times, straight ahead. There was so much to see and it was really hard!!!!

We got quite tired and decided to spend some time finding a very nice restaurant to have our last dinner of the year at. We were all completely pooped from the night before, we ended up deciding to go for a nice, relaxed end to the year rather than a repeat of the night before. We walked around for so long, and eventually, found this spanish restaurant, hidden away on it's own in a little alleyway. Honestly, so cute!

Notice how the doorways are heaps quirky? The entrance, is like a sorta quarter circle shape, and has a heavy animal skin curtain covering it and the other one looks like it was randomly knocked down to make room so the waitresses could get in and out.

We were in a spanish restaurant, so I felt it fitting to get some Sangria!

We had some interesting appetisers which consisted of some cured meats, spanish bruschetta (which is the pastey thing on the croutons (really yummy and no bits falling off yay!) and....sheep cheese! (it's covered by the prosciutto like meat). I had never tried sheep cheese. It was interesting....

Again, being in Spanish restaurant, I decided to order Tapas and try the mussels. They had a special where I could pick three different tapas and it would be served to me on the same plate as a main. My choices were calamari, mushrooms and mussells and I was decidedly worried that this would not be enough food....

I was wrong.

AMAZING.

Seriously. AMAZING.

OKKKK! Stop talking about food? Yeah, I thought so.

If your question is, does Belgium do fireworks? The answer is, YES! Now, Amsterdam has an interesting way of doing fireworks, I was told. Basically, you can buy fireworks. It is legal and so everyone buys them, spending like 60 million a year on fireworks, and everyone goes out on the streets and lights them. It is basically the night where the city turns into a shambles, fireworks everywhere! People losing fingers, houses burn down...and the city is a com-pleeete mess the next morning! No joke. It is meant to be ridiculous.

Well, I was a bit disappointed to miss that crazy shambles of a New Year but Belgium, turns out, also does the same thing, on a smaller scale but still...everywhere you could hear fireworks going off from half an hour before midnight. And some were actually really quite impressive. As the clock counted down to midnight, we had taken our place at the river...and it had a view of a good portion of the city, and we could see fireworks on the left on the right, behind us, behind the buildings, beyond the trees. EVERYWHERE! People were also lighting lanterns which fly in the air. And they were in the sky. The sound was crazy cause it was just so many noises banging from everywhere - as midnight hit, the official fireworks started - AMONGST ALL THE OTHER FIREWORKS which were let off! Far out. It was pretty craaaazy! Impossible to get a photo... I did try and take a video on my SLR but it ran out.....I did take a lot of photos during the day, oops. Either way, it was pretty cool :D

Sure, Sydney's fireworks are choreographed to music and super co-ordinated....but why would you want that when you can have absolute chaos from all directions, fireworks everywhere being let off by whoever to the sound of a cacophany of bang - wheee- ba- baaaa -bang -wheee wheeee and the clocks all chiming away with the crowd cheering. Definitely a cool way to bring in the new year! If only the phone lines in Belgium had held up... but hey, it's the same in Australia. Impossible with everyone texting their midnight messages! I couldn't even get a message through! CRAZY STUFF!!!!!!

So here's one of the videos I took of the fireworks when they first sorta started before my camera ran out of battery. You'll get a few crackers from around I think a minute and a bit in... but yea hopefully that'll give you an idea of what it was like.

Well, anyhow, that is the brief rundown of everything in Gent! Hopefully it's not too dull. I'm pretty tired from the busy weekend so I'm quite ready for bed. My neck is still being stupid and sore so hopefully it won't fall off cause that won't look so nice in photos on this blog. We shall see. I'm going to be decidedly more free over the next few days as it is my last few before I'm off so if you wanna catch me on skype. This is a good week to do so :D

Hope you guys all had a great new year!!!!!!!! And thanks for reading. It is you guys who keep me writing.

Gent: Part 1 - The Crazy Night Before NYE

It's finally 2012!!!!

It's the Big Year that we've all been waiting for - Or maybe that's just me. 2012 has been marked in my mental calender for years as what should be an amazing and unpredictable year. With the prospect of living in a country I know nothing about, studying at Uni, living on campus, making new friends, travelling with new and old friends and My Love coming to meet me in Sweden at the end of my studies - the first half of this year should prove to be a dooozy! Who knows what the second half will hold?! So how was everyone's celebrations into the New Year? Mine were celebrated in a Medieval city called Gent in Belgium.

We left on Friday afternoon the day before New Years Eve and were planning to be back on New Year's Day afternoon. The cat, of course, was not so happy about the prospect of us leaving for so long.

Goodbye Poffy!

So, we casually just drove to Belgium, picking up Michiel's brother along the way, and 2 and a half hours later, we were in Gent! Finding the Bed and Breakfast (Myriam's Place) we were staying at was an absolute bitch to tell the truth. By the time we got there, it was night time and the gps was just, well, being a gps. Telling you to go down roads that ended up being dead ends because of construction sites or telling us to go down one way streets the wrong way. It was all very confusing and a little stressful for all but a GREAT TOUR OF THE CITY!!!! We drove through what I think ... was a shopping street...for pedestrians because there sure as heck were no other cars there. The pedestrians were looking at us like we were the crazy tourists that we were as we drove through...slowly parting the shoppers but there was no other way to go!!! Honest. And we drove down tram lines that were "strictly not for cars" and began to familiarise ourselves with multiple landmarks as we saw them time after time again. When we finally found the street our BnB was on, it was a thin one way street with no parking so the lady (who's name is actually Myriam) told us to "park wrongly" so we parked smack in the middle of the street and fetched her as she was going to lead us to private parking. It was a quiet street, but of course, just when we need it to stay quiet, all the cars magically decide they want to drive down this tiny little hidden side street causing quite a bit of problems, some honking, and unsuccessful parking attempts, awkward reversing and just a lot of fuss in general. The whole ride through Gent was also really bumpy cause their roads are all cobblestone - very cool - but kinda bumpy and uncomfortable when you have a tendency to get carsick...I much prefer walking around on cobblestones!

Anyway, Myriam's place was as charming and ancient as I had been promised. I scored a bed up in the loft!

Now, what were we planning to do in Belgium? Ang and I had made an "itinerary" *proud face.* 19 awesome pubs. We were going to go bar hopping and drink at least one beer at every single one of them! That's right! Yeah! Because we all know that the thing to do in Belgium is DRINK BELGIAN BEER! (and drink we did)

Here is a proud Angela with her itinerary and Michiel excited because he will get beer.

Our first walk through the city of Gent was breathtakingly awesome. It has a great atmosphere and a lot of the really nice buildings are lit up with these lights which are embedded in the pavement floor. It was, however, hard to get very nice photos without the flash as they kept going blurry - damn shutter speed!

We ended up getting quite lost but eventually found our way to the restaurant area of the city.

Pretty right? I was also told that I HAVE to drink thgis beer, which was made by monks and was meant to be amazing. I found this sign advertising if in the window.

We had already picked the place we were eating: a restaurant specialising in different animals such as rattlesnake, ostrich and crocodile. The menu looked pretty awesome!

We ordered ourselves a round of Delirium Tremens and it was, actually, really delicious! I really liked it and not bitter at all!

In terms of meals, Michiel and his brother both ordered the Crocodile, Angela wanted to try Kangaroo as she had not yet tried it and I was going to get the Ostrich. But they ran out and for that night, there were no other crazy meat dishes. The only other thing on the menu which was kinda different was a Congo dish called Moambe which was Chicken with lots of things we didn't know, one called "saka saka". One thing to remember is that the menus here and in Netherlands are in dutch and that makes it quite hard in a restaurant. I'm lucky to have people with me to help me and translate but it must be pretty interesting for other ignorant tourists.

Of course, here is my food shot.

So what were the meals like? Haha, well we tried a bit of everyone's and that was definitely an experience. The crocodile looked a little like largish pieces of white fish and they were topped with red curry sauce. It was suprisingly chewy but with a fishy texture. The kangaroo had been cooked to perfection and it was very soft and really yum! (usually the times I've had it, it has been kinda chewy too). My chicken was also quite tasty but reasonally non offensive. The two interesting things on my plate however, were the "fried banana" and the "green goop." Which to talk about first? Well, the green goop can only be described as having the look, taste and feel of crushed up, blended, grass. It tasted like grass. It smelled like grass. Do I like eating grass? Um, not really...  haha. And the banana was especially strange. You'd think it would be soft and mushy but it appeared to maybe be dehydrated, so it had the texture when you cut it, of hard butter and just tasted odd... ODD, I tells ya! All in all though, we were quite content with our interesting meals, in the interesting restaurant, drinking our beers. We got quite full actually but still managed to fit in dessert. Here is my creme brule! YAY CREME BRULE

A group shot before we left

From there, we moved on to Pub #1, a reasonably packed European looking pub, with barrels, beer signs, and specialising in something like 100 different kinds of beers.

My first beer was called Barbar, recommended to me, and was a honey beer. It was quite tasty, but if I had to pick, I liked the Delirium even more!

Next round was the killer. We decided to get, after seeing the guy on the table next to us, a round of "QUARKS" or "KWAKS?" (I'm not sure how to spell it). They were these crazy big glasses of beers with a bulb on the top and a bulb on the bottom. But they came at a price. Our shoes. No joke. The guy who took our order stole one shoe from each of us! It was a deposit to get the glasses back. Now we knew these glasses were going to be something special.

All the drinking meant lots of toilet trips, so my sock also got quite dirty :( I did try hopping

Angela refused to walk to the bathroom with one shoe, so I had to give her my other one. Except she was wearing a boot with heels and I was not so, that was a good look. I think it will really take off!

From there it was all kinda down hill.

We also decided to see how many kwark beer glasses tall I was:

I am 3 qwarks tall!

Yay we got our shoes back eventually!

Needless to say, we had a pretty fun night and eventually stumbled home, getting very lost again for a nice long sleep. During the trip home, I lost my camera lens cap, my umbrella was broken, and the furry hood of my jacket got a ripped off a little bit and now it flops weird. The photos I took, however, are AWESOME.

This is getting long so I'm going to pop the actual NYE into a new blog for your convenience. Aren't I kind?