historic Ghent (mainly St. Bavo's)

We grabbed a quiche and sandwich at a cute little café (Ghent has

They put clothes on Adam and Eve at one point...

awesome places to eat because they are such a university town, you know like Big Rapids) went straight into the city center and to St. Bavo’s church to see the Ghent Altarpiece before the church closed.  We looked around the church, went through the crypt, got our tickets and listened to the 50  minute audioguide about every panel while staring at it with 50 other people in a tiny little room 

Baroque pulpit with an cherub taking the fruit from the serpent 

where it was enclosed by bulletproof glass.  No one would stand there that long if the audio guide didn’t take that long.  Now, it gave some good information, but just narrate panel by panel and don’t make me put in a new number to move to the next one and start off with hymnal music and end with hymnal music because you’re just keeping everyone in this tiny room for longer, when they all would have moved on 30 

minutes ago.  This altarpiece was completed in 1432 and shows again how detail oriented the Flemish painters were, but one panel is still missing, Adam and Eve and the whole back of the altarpiece were in black and white and that didn’t seem right to me, because those are the panels that are currently under 

flashbacks to Bernini's St. Theresa

restoration.  You couldn’t take pictures, but they have a copy in the chapel that it was originally sat in that you could still move.   I don’t know if the copy is just not good (most likely) or the lighting in the chapel makes that much of a difference (also likely), but the original looked amazing.  Unfortunately, by the time we were done looking at all of this, the gift shop had closed and we couldn’t get the things we wanted there

the crypt with the original church and frescoes

  and it’s closed on Sundays, so we screwed up there.

We continued on our city walk and went down graffiti alley, came across another photo exhibit (not nearly as awesome as the one in Florence with the 

Rubens with his wives in the picture on the left

Caravaggio’s) and went in a candy shop to find some candies that were mentioned in the guidebook.  We made the mistake of asking the lady in the candy store to recommend some place for dinner.  I think that the guidebook even says, don’t ask in Belgium unless you want to talk for a while and that’s exactly what we got.  20 minutes later, we knew that she  

the fake altarpiece closed

 didn’t want to go to Italy with her husband this weekend because she didn’t want to leave her dog, the names and addresses of several places to eat, and that she can’t trust her daughter to watch her dog.  At least the candy was good and the place she recommended for

fake altarpiece open 

 food was excellent (that waterzooi soup).  Back to the hotel in the rain where John slept about 2 feet below me on his bed that had no structure to it, but, again, no mosquitoes, so who’s complaining?