I said that the holiday would involve a lot of sitting around doing nothing. I was actually very wrong. Most of the holiday was spent touristing it up, in Ghent, Brussels and Brugges. Ghent was the closest and so we spent most time there. Brussels and Brugges we only went to on day trips. We went to cathedrals, museums, parks and art galleries. All of it fairly interesting. I saw a statue by Michaelangelo, a painting by Rubens and another painting called the "Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" which apparently is very famous, though I can't say I'd heard of it. I can't say I'm particularly into art but there is a almost spiritual quality to an old piece of truly amazing art such as this.
The day we went to Brugges it was hot. Seriously hot. Too hot. What we did that day was fairly unremarkable. I remember seeing awful imitation football shirts in souvenir shops. The worst was a Chelsea shirt, the sponsor on the front was Fly Emirates (that hasn't been Chelsea's shirt sponsor since 2005) and the name on the back was Robben (who left Chelsea in 2007). There were others, such as a Manchester United Van Nistelrooy shirt. Ridiculous.
Brussels was slightly more... dangerous. The plan was to park at a car park on the outskirts of the city and get the underground. Unfourtunately, we missed the turning to the car park, got in a tunnel which was about three miles long and came up in the city centre. My dad was sweating by this point, and the levels of traffic caused him to lose his nerve. He took a right turn. I thought something was wrong at the time, but it wasn't until I turned around to see a one way sign - pointing in the opposite direction to the one we were travelling in - that I realised we were in trouble. As we were hit with a barrage of horns from angry Brusselians (it is the right word, I checked) my dad started to panic more and more. The road was too narrow to turn around so we followed it to the end, the end being a roundabout. Because of the angle of the road, coupled with the stress, my dad proceeded to circumnavigate the roundabout - clockwise. Yes, his brain reverted to what it knew best and took him around the roundabout as though we were in England. Bad times. Fair to say I was pretty nervous, but we managed to survive. I think we may, however, have also skipped 3 or 4 red lights during the rest of our journey through Brussels.
We spent a lot of time on the lake near our caravan. That was sweet. It was a pretty big lake and we'd bought an inflatable boat before we left which we used every day. It was good fun, rowing around the lake, jumping out to swim and just cooling off after a very hot day. However, I got very tired swimming, very quickly, which really sucks. I've not been swimming properly for such a long time that I've gotten amazing bad at it. I really need to swim properly in the future.
The caravan site we were staying at was OK. It smelt bad in places because of the heat, in fact, in various places throught Brussels there was a strong smell of rotting rubbish. It makes you realise how good Britain's waste services are. But the mere smell of the rubbish alone didn't leave me with the enduring memory of the holiday. That came from a fateful night in which I was having a shower. Obviously the showers in campsites are communal. The block nearest to my caravan only had two showers (Europeans don't shower much apparently, they prefer to just wash at a sink) a normal one and a disabled one. I always went for the normal one if I had the choice, but one time the normal one was occupied, so I went for the disabled one. Everything was going fine, I'd just started my shower, when, for some reason, I decided to have a little sit down. The disabled shower had a little plastic folding chair like this:
Except without the arms and the bit attached to the wall was solid. Plainer basically. Now, I don't know what possessed me to sit down, but for some reason, I had the urge to do it. I opened the chair up and lowered myself onto it, when I took a glance, and saw a horrific site. The chair was covered in shit. Yes, somebody had thought it would be fun to shit on the chair and fold it up. When the chair was folded it wasn't visible, and I had noticed an odd odour in that shower, but I'd put it on coming from the toilets nearby, or the rubbish which was outside (as I mentioned, the site was rather bad smelling). Luckily I was able to stand myself back up before I sat on it, and shut the monstrosity, and presently finished my shower quickly and went back to the caravan to shiver in a corner.
I think that's all there is to the general holiday. The travelling was pretty OK, I've been on rougher journeys. I spent a lot of the time sleeping, watching DVDs or just listening to music (I'll cover that in a different post), but the highlight of the travelling was the amazing Tikka Masala I had on the ferry on the way back. I was so hungry, and it was truly amazing. I've had worse Tikka Masala in Indian resteraunts.
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