**Click HERE to look at pictures and videos from our time in Ghent**
Both: Hey, everyone!
Jen: It's Jen and Greg with an update on our travels.
Greg: This update is about...
Both: Gentse Feesten!
Greg: Which is a Dutch term that means “Festival of Ghent”.
Jen: Yeah, we decided to go to Ghent because it's one of the best places to visit in Belgium, with lots of really cool architecture, and it's really a pretty town to see.
Greg: Yeah, and we picked a hotel called 1898 The Post, which is a boutique hotel right in Old Ghent. It's along the river. It's a really well-regarded hotel, and we thought it would be the best place to stay.
Jen: Yeah, it actually also used to be an old post office, so that added a little bit of extra charm to it.
Greg: Right, and then we got the email…
Jen: Yeah, that email that we referenced in the previous update that basically said, “Do you really know what you're getting into?”
Greg: That email — just to give you an idea — has the subject line, “Congratulations, your reservation is during Gentse Feesten!”
Jen: Which, when we saw that, we had no idea what that was.
Greg: Nope.
Jen: And then we just continued to read on in the email. And some of the highlights of the email I'll just share with you, “After more than 175 years, Gentse Feesten has developed into one of the largest cultural festivals in Europe. During 10 days, six festivals are being organized, and it's cost-free on 10 squares.”
And then another section says, “The hotel is located between the two main stages in the heart of the festival and music will be played during the day and the better part of the evening…until 3 a.m. on some nights.”
Greg: Yeah. To me, that's almost morning. I normally wake up within two hours of 3 a.m.
Jen: (laughs)
So they did also say if you decide you don't want to partake in the festival, you can cancel your reservation at no charge. So Greg and I talked about it and we did this little exercise to decide whether or not we wanted to embrace the festival or avoid the festival.
Greg: Yeah. Why you would want to go and why you wouldn't want to go and it was the same answer, kind of for both of us, on both counts. We both wouldn't want to go because it's almost two million people —
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: — that go to this festival. And I'm not really a person who's big into huge, massive crowds confined in small areas. And…the reason to go for both of us was part of this whole travel thing we started was to have experiences you couldn't get staying at home, to embrace different cultures and different events and this is exactly why we started all of this. So we just said, let's do it.
Jen: Yep. So just to note…at this point, when we got to Ghent, we had been traveling for four straight months and up until then, our travel had been very regimented, really. We had a schedule and we had everything set. But by month four, we'd become more comfortable with kind of winging it along the way. And it really allowed us to appreciate the Ghent Festival more because of the way we had learned to travel.
Greg: So to kind of give you a little bit better of an idea — it's music, which is a big part of it, but there's also theater performances in a different area of the town. There's a little area that's a carnival with rides and carnival food. There are puppeteers randomly in various areas around town, sketch artists, caricature artists. There's a section where they had opera and opera singers, there are street performers all throughout. It's a very large festival, and it is very popular from the crowds we saw.
Jen: And it's just a big party in the town!
Greg: Yeah. And I think the general intention is to be a celebration of Dutch and Belgium culture, but specifically in the area around Ghent.
Jen: Flanders area, I believe, is what they call it.
Greg: Yeah, I think you're right.
So we got there and had a whole afternoon and then we had a whole full day the next day before we left the following morning. That first afternoon, we walked around to kind of get a feel around the area of the hotel. And one of the things we did was go by the carnival area.
Jen: You can't have a fair without a funnel cake. So I got a more traditional Dutch dessert called an oliebollen — which is really fun to say — but it's similar to a Dutch beignet.
Greg: Yeah. So as we said before, the hotel is between the two main stages. So walking down the hall to our room across the river was a main stage — very large — and was focused on more Latin Caribbean music most of the time.
Jen: Yeah, it was funny because I told Greg, “I'm pretty sure they're playing Tejano music.” So it was kind of weird to hear that in Belgium.
Greg: Yeah, you could hear it just fine in the hall. And then when you go in the room, you don't hear that stage anymore because you're right next to the other main stage, which is more popular music or rock based. And it sounded like you just had the radio on in the room kind of loudly. But still, you could hear it all.
Jen: Yeah, and we really should have known what we were getting ourselves into when we saw that there were earplugs on the nightstands. (laughs)
So the band that was playing that afternoon was a band called Outback. It was a cover band. They covered a wide variety of types of music - pop, rock, punk, metal, all different kinds. And their lead singer was so energetic. He was all over the stage and the crowd was just eating it up.
So I had listened to them for about 45 minutes from the room and decided, I really want to go down there. And I looked out at the crowd and it was large, but it wasn't, like, super overwhelming. So I decided to just jump in and do it. Singing and dancing around with a bunch of perfect strangers was a lot of fun!
Greg: Another group that came up, which we appreciated, was called Franklin. They're a soul group, all girls, I think it’s three of them.
Jen: Mmhmm.
Greg: And they stuck really to Motown, a little bit of Muscle Shoals. And I appreciated it because the style, the vocals, they really did capture the spirit of what music used to be back then.
Plus, we had discovered by this point our own little area in the hotel down the hall from our room, which was great for watching performances on that stage.
Jen: Yeah, I dubbed it our VIP lounge because it overlooked directly the stage. And so it was a good way to be able to see the crowd, but not have to be in the crowd. (laughs)
Greg: Yeah. And you really did get the audio in that room like you were at the concert, except not blaringly loud, just the right level for you to appreciate the music.
Jen: Yeah, and I think one of the favorites of the whole festival for us — and apparently for a lot of other people based on the crowd that saw them — was a Queen tribute band called Mother Mercury. The lead singer was a former winner of Belgium's version of Star Trek….Star Trek?
Both: (laughs)
Jen: Not Star Trek…
Star Struck, which is a British show that people go on and they impersonate famous singers. And this guy emulated Freddie Mercury so convincingly that the crowd almost acted like they were at a Queen concert.
Greg: And the crowd was very big. Like, Outback was probably a hundred, 200 people maybe. Their whole area around the stage was full, but it didn't really spill over into side streets and anything. Mother Mercury, there was no place for anyone to walk for two blocks worth of space. It was easily over 1,000 people, probably was a couple of thousand people.
Jen: Yeah, and I had looked back after it was all over, and apparently this group is kind of, like, a recurring guest at Gentse Feesten, and so they draw a huge crowd.
Greg: They did, yes. Well, besides the music festival piece, we also ventured out into an area that was more like folk music-based, but also some other pieces, because we wanted to catch an act called Hella, which I had seen on YouTube at one point.
So it's got like, you know, over 100,000 views. It's not millions of views, but they're pretty good. It was, uh, four women that had terrific harmony. They're very skilled vocally. Uh, unfortunately, about 10 minutes into the performance, rain started and everybody had to take cover.
Jen: Yeah, I think I enjoyed them too, just because they were so calming, their voices. And it was in a more secluded area of the festival, like, it was on the outskirts. So there wasn't the big crowds, so it was a more intimate place. And until the rain started, people were spread out on the grass, having picnics, enjoying time with friends. So it was a lot more chill and I think more fun.
We do have a little bit of video. We were there for a short time before it started raining, so I was able to get some video of them.
Greg: One of the other really cool things we did is the full day we were there after breakfast, we decided to go out and walk around the town. And while we were walking by one of the big churches, we saw a sign on a door because we wanted to go in. But it said, basically, we're about to do an organ concert.
Jen: So we just decided, let's stay for the concert. The concert itself was donation-based, so we just decided, we'll give them 10 euro. We walk into this beautiful church, take a look around and enjoy the surroundings.
Greg: There's an original-to-the-church organ that's hundreds of years old. Absolutely beautiful to look at.
Jen: Beautiful…but it needs a lot of work.
Greg: Yeah, and that was actually the point of not just this concert. It turns out you would attend this concert, and then when it was done, everyone walks to the next church and attends another concert.
Jen: Like an organ crawl!
Greg: Yeah!
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: And I think it was five or six churches, and they were hoping to raise enough money for restoration and, I think, some other efforts around organs in Ghent.
Jen: Yeah, the organist had an assistant that was pulling the knobs for him. So if you're not familiar with how pipe organs work, there's a bunch of different knobs that have to be pushed and pulled to make the right sounds and that's what this guy was doing.
And at one point I looked at Greg and I said, “I think the organist might actually be blind.” And I looked it up later online and he was. I think it just made it more poignant and moving as we listened to it.
Greg: Yeah. I mean, the whole thing was also unexpected. We just walked by the church we wanted to look at, turns out there was this concert. I had been wanting to attend an organ concert in one of these impressive cathedrals in Europe. So overall, it was an experience I'm glad that we had.
Jen: Yeah! And we saw another beautiful church.
Greg: Indeed. Wrapping up, I'm glad we decided to embrace Gentse Feesten.
Jen: Yeah, me too. I was kind of hoping we'd find another music festival along the way! (laughs)
Greg: I don't know that I could have done that more than once.
Jen: Oh, come on! (laughs)
Greg: But Ghent is a place I think I would like to see again, specifically because so much of it I couldn't experience due to the festival. But I don't know that I want to go to Gentse Feesten again.
Jen: That was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Greg: Yeah, I mean, almost two million people in just a week. I can't do that again.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: In any case, the next update is where we begin our trek into…Deutschland!
Jen: (laughs) We have lots of stories about Germany.
Greg: Specifically, we're going to start with our one afternoon in Cologne. And from Cologne, we went to Heidelberg, Germany.
Jen: Yeah, and Heidelberg, Germany is where we learned that we are not hikers. But it was still nice, and we can't wait to tell you about it!
Greg: Indeed. So, thank you for checking in!
Jen: And we'll see you at the next stop!
