"Colorado! That is Not How You Treat Our Noses!" --Ghent, Belgium

We got off to a late start on Thursday.

Although, after over a month on the Mediterranean and five weeks of hitching, I'm now far less antsy about leaving late in the day.

We leave when we leave. 

I hollowed out an apple and stuffed it full of oats, raisins and honey so that Maud could wake up to a home that smelled like breakfast. 

The smell of baked apple and honey in the morning is almost as good as the smell of coffee and bacon. Almost.

We left at 10:30.  And I wasn't antsy at all.

Tessa + Southern Italy = significantly more relaxed Aimee. About schedules, at least. Ha. I wonder what the stereotypical "mañana" culture of Mexico will do to me.

As Maud doesn't have an active CSing profile and it's difficult to find hosts for a party of two (as Tessa and I experienced during our Balkan adventure), Maud decided to just book one night at a hotel in Ghent. The website had said that check-in was 12:00, but the real-life lady said that check-in was at two. She also said that she had no idea when buses left for the city center (or when they returned), but that they should be about every three minutes.

"I wonder how long she's worked here..." I grumbled as we returned our things to Maud's car. "Seems like a common sort of question. "When does the bus to town leave?" Did she say how long it would take?"

"About twenty minutes."

It took forty-five minutes to get into town via bus and tram.

Must still be pretty new to the job. Goodness. 

But Ghent. Ghent was well worth the two hour drive from Rotterdam and the forty-five minute journey from the hotel with the uninformed receptionist.

Ghent

• Capital city of East Flanders. What is East Flanders? One of the five provinces of Flanders. What is Flanders? One of Belgium's three regions (Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia). What is Belgium? That place that makes all the beer, chocolate, waffles and FRIES (chips, if you're from the UK/anywhere in the world other than the US)

•  Because Belgium is situated between Holland, Germany and France (with a wee bit of Luxemburg getting chummy with Wallonia), language can be a bit messy (language tends to be messy all over Europe, though. No country seems to agree on just one). Flemish people from Flanders speak their own version of Dutch (Maud says it is very different and ought not be confused with Netherlands Dutch) and Walloons (Walloons! I want to be a Walloon!) speak French. A few of the eastern inhabitants speak German, but the vast majority stick to their unique versions of Dutch and French.
• Belgium has an annual parade wherein men wear wax masks and preposterously large ostrich feather hats (which can cost 300 dollars to rent) and then march through the streets with baskets of oranges. The oranges are thrown at people and into houses and raucous merriment is made. 

The center of Ghent is the largest pedestrian area in Belgium. This doesn't mean pedestrians can walk in a relaxed manner, however. As in Holland, Belgium is positively rife with kamikaze bikers.

Many shop windows like this. If I weren't so allergic to beer, Ghent would put a significant dent in my dwindling budget.

It's like the Venice of Belgium.

A famous candy in Belgium (other than the chocolate) is the cuberdon. These cultural, cone-shaped goodies are called "noses" and are usually raspberry flavored (although some are flavored of licorice to cater to Dutch taste buds). As Maud and I had decided to save the chocolate for Bruges, we splurged on cuberdon. This fellow in the reddish hat made a face and wiggled his fingers when I took his picture, so Maud and I bought five candies from his stall.

We tried to avoid eye-contact with the openly unhappy cuberdon competitor on his right.

We paid for our noses and took gooey bites. Maud ended up with webs of sticky black licorice all over her face. I ended up with half my raspberry nose on the ground.

This is more complicated than I expected...

"Colorado! That is not how you treat our noses!" bowler hat man yelled at me.

I giggled and brushed the dust off my dirty cuberdon.

"You know you just bought chemicals, don't you?" the sour chap manning the competing nose stand informed me, voice boiling over with bitterness. "They're fake. That's the kind you could buy in the store. They are only here to sell to tourists."

I laughed. I thought it was another joke, because... well... who gets up in arms over a gummy nose?

"Don't laugh," he glared at me. "It's not funny. This is serious."

It's a nose, I thought as I curbed my chuckling to a smile.

"We sell the real thing. Made with fruit and not chemicals. Here, taste this. It's much better."

He handed me one of his chemical- free noses and I took a bite.

"It is much better," I replied honestly and handed the other half to Maud.

"It's because these are homemade. His. His are chemicals."

"Well, that's too bad," I shrugged. "Guess we'll do better next time."

"No, don't eat those noses!" the man persisted. "They'll give you cancer!"

We backed away slowly and swung a right.

"That was intense," I said as I tried to savor my last candy nose, but found myself having a rather difficult time. "I thought you said Belgians were friendly."

"Not these ones, man."

Street musicians were on every corner. Pianists, guitarists, flutists -- there was even a fellow playing a relative of Tibetan singing bowl. Maud and I were intrigued by this relation, so we stopped to listen and take a quick picture. Before I could snap my photo, another bystander snapped at us, saying, "He doesn't want a picture! Don't take a picture! Give him ten f*cking cents, will you?" and then stamped off.

"That was kind of intense,"I wondered as we wandered away.

"I was about to give him money. Jesus. I was just backing up 'cos that truck was about to hit me," Maud shook her head. "Don't believe anything I said about Belgians. So far they're just bitter and aggressive, man."

Shoes, anyone?

It was coffee time. We were desperate to sit down, drink cappuccinos and not get harassed by locals who'd probably had it up to their 300 dollar ostrich plumes with tourists. So we walked away from the major attractions and up a more industrial street until we stumbled across a cafe with colorful chairs and tables that resembled footstools.

We asked for the wifi password, ordered two cappuccinos and a plate of local ham and cheese.

The waitress forgot the wifi password. She returned with a slip of paper five minutes later.

"And where's the ham?" I asked Maud who asked the waitress. She slapped her forehead and ran back into the kitchen, knocking silverware onto the floor as she fled.

We finished our cappuccinos and asked for the bill.

Then we waited five minutes.

Then ten.

Then twenty.

"In Holland, if you have to wait over twenty minutes for the bill, you just leave," Maud told me. "Well, if the place is busy, you wait. But not when it's like this," she gestured to the mostly empty patio.

We received our bill thirty minutes after asking for it. Twice. With some vile chocolate covered marshmallows (I could taste the cancer) to "make up" for their "confusing day".

Maud and I laughed. We weren't upset in the least -- Belgium was just confusing us with our experience of aggressive and unhelpful/confused Flemish.

This place sells homemade candy with real fruit. Go here if you want to avoid crazed cuberdon sellers.

Mammelokkers. This translates roughly into "breast lickers." The legend behind this Belgian candy is that a man sentenced to die of starvation was allowed one visitor per day and the visitor was (obviously) allowed to bring no food into the prison (as it would disrupt the whole "starvation" bit). However, this lucky fellow received visits from his breastfeeding daughter, so whilst all the other prisoners perished early on, the daughter's milk kept her father alive. Once the guards saw what these two were up to, they were moved to pardon the father. So. Now there are mammelokkers.

These are "real" noses. Just so you know.

This poster means that if you piss in public, you'll get a 60 euro fine. They don't mess around with public urination like the Dutch don't mess around with illegal parking.

But we wondered what this was...

We stopped for a picnic (aka, bottle of white wine) and nap in a small city park.

If you ever travel with me, understand that there will be picnics. Probably with naps and podcasts about lucid dreaming, extraterrestrial life and travel to the wine region of Italy.

Maud understands this well.

We finished off the evening with chips. Maud had read my "Because I Can't Say it To Your Face" post, so she bought the fried potatoes with great trepidation and handed them to me gingerly.

"I'm not going to throw them at you," I gave her my solemn word. "I want to try chips in Belgium. Just like I tried pizza in Naples and granita in Catania. This is where chips are from and I want to eat them. Even though I generally dislike them very much indeed."

"Chips!" Maud grinned broadly. "You're European now. We've got you."

Some chip speculators say that when Meusse Valley Belgians couldn't catch little fish in the sixteen hundreds, they cut potatoes into the size of small fish and fried those instead.

"Almost," I sighed into the half-pint of mayonnaise dolloped atop the chips. "I still don't understand centimeters. For instance, I'm 67 kilograms and 5 foot 6."

As suspected the woman at the hotel had given us the wrong information regarding the bus. It did not leave every three minutes.

It left every forty minutes.

Maud and I took the tram to the bus stop and then decided to spend forty-five minutes walking back to the hotel. As opposed to forty minutes waiting in the cold (yay!) for the infrequent (but timely) Belgian bus.