Galavanting around Gent

In the early evening, we headed back to the train station where the rest of his group headed back to Brussels and Dallin and I headed to another little town called Gent. Gent was smaller and less touristy, but just as cool. Nothing incredibly thrilling to do, but there was tons of cool architecture to see and take pictures of, which is what Dallin and I spent the evening doing. There is even an ancient castle right in the middle of Gent.



At one point in the picture-taking, Dallin had stopped to take some pictures and I had walked a little bit ahead. There were a couple of shady guys along the bridge where we were taking pictures who had been drinking and it wasn’t anything overtly inappropriate, but they were giving me looks and making some comments; it’s hard to explain that feeling you get at certain times around certain men unless you’re a girl. So I walked back towards Dallin and linked arms with him, which he was very cool about, and then explained after we passed them why I had. He was very nice and when we had to pass them to go back the other way, he offered me his arm again. Great friend. We got back to his house and ended up watching a short Dutch film, which had actually been up for an Academy Award and was quite hilarious.



The next morning it was off to Dallin’s namesake, the town of Leuven (His last name is VanLeuven). We pretty much did the same thing we had done in all the other little towns- lots of walking. I think I pretty much walked for like 4 ½ days straight. We saw some other cool buildings, took more pictures, etc. But it was ok, I wasn’t too picky about what we did; I was just happy to see a new/old face. New in the sense that it was someone I hadn’t seen every day for the past 5 ½ months, but old since we went to high school together and knew each other. We did see some random things in Leuven, like this bug. No idea.








Afterwards, we attempted to get to a suburb of Brussels called Tervuren, which Dallin said was quite nice. The difficult part was getting there. We checked the buses, saw one that said it was going there, even asked the bus driver- who confirmed that’s where he was going, so we settled in. At one point, Dallin asked the driver if he could tell us which stop it was, since his friend who lives there had even missed it. At this point, the bus driver gets a distressed look on his face and says, uh… I’m not going there. Uh, what? Come again? Did we not just ask you this? So he dropped us off as near as he went, and we walked the remaining 2 or so kilometers, because we hadn’t had quite enough walking. We walked past this African museum, but instead of going in, we just wandered through the park outside of it and took a picture with the elephants. We then met up with his friend and had a relaxing dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant before heading back to Brussels. We were both exhausted, but knew we needed to figure out what we were doing the next day.