hotels

My Wild Night in Brussels

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I thought that staying near the Brussels airport after close to a week in Flanders was a smart move. I was going to do serious sight-seeing in Ghent and Antwerp and had been to Brussels several times before. By the time I got to Brussels, I would be tired and all I’d want was a comfortable place to repack my bags, snooze, and have a last good meal.

I did not expect riot police.

But here’s what happened first:

No one at the hotel told me that the “few minutes” from the train station closest to my hotel were all uphill and also involved a couple of staircases connected to a highway underpass, followed by more uphill schlepping of my roll-aboard. Then the check-in clerk took my reservation for a 4AM airport shuttle the next morning but didn’t inform me that my room rate included a breakfast bag—I found out what I was missing from other riders en route to Zaventem Airport when it was too late.

My room hadn’t been dusted well, but then neither was the hotel restaurant, which also had a chunk missing from the wall near where I had a meal. Maybe a hungry diner had taken a bite out of it while waiting—my dinner took way too long to arrive, even by European standards. But I figured the good wine I drank would knock me out for a few hours of sleep.

I woke near midnight wondering if climate change had somehow made Belgium prone to earthquakes, because my bed and the walls were shaking.

It took me a minute to realize the culprit was thumping bass from a party somewhere in the hotel. The noise only got worse and I knew sleep wasn’t an option. Sitting down at the desk to catch up with email, I could feel my chair practically move with the beat of the one song whose lyrics I could make out: “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.”

[Insert ironic comment here]

I was more than happy to leave, but when I got to the lobby at 3:45am, I found it filled with Belgian police in their distinctive bilingual vests.

Police cars were parked outside as if this were a crime scene. One cop in the lobby was wrestling with a drunken shouting woman he was trying to eject from the hotel. Other young revelers in tuxes and short sequined dresses were loitering drunkenly in the lobby and outside. One couple fled from an elevator as if being chased by the zombies in World War Z.

I asked a policeman in French what had happened and he said there had been a “fight” and was reluctant to say anything else. In all the confusion and clamor, there was only one man at the hotel desk, and the police seemed to be lined up partly to prevent the counter from being stormed.

I’ll never know all the details of what happened, but the chaos was a gift: For writers, everything is material.

Lev Raphael has been to Europe many times. He speaks French, German, and some Dutch. He’s the author of 26 books including the memoir/travelogue My Germany and most recently State University of Murder.  He teaches creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com.

Falling in Love With Ghent

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The psychologist Otto Rank wrote that artists are perpetually in conflict with life.  They need seclusion to produce their work, but they also need to go out into the world for stimulation to create their art.

Whatever takes me away from home, I’m always receptive to possible locations for stories, essays, and books–and I return with lots of notes and photographs.  I was recently in Ghent, Belgium on a travel grant, liaising with officials from Ghent University to explore the possibility of a study abroad program with Michigan State University.  The city is widely called “a hidden gem.” It’s all that, and more.  Day after day I felt bombarded with impressions and ideas I knew would fuel my writing down the road.  I fell in love with a city I’d known almost nothing about, and fell hard.  Here’s why.

First there are the people. As my favorite author Henry James would have put it, “the note” of the city is friendliness. I got that vibe everywhere, whether in sandwich or coffee shops, stores, restaurants, and even from strangers who helped me when I got slightly lost. Some of them walked a short distance with me to make sure I was headed in the right direction.

As a writer, I seek comfort and quiet when I travel and the Carlton Hotel Gent was the epitome of those things. Family owned, boutique-style, it was smoothly run, ultra-quiet, close to the train station, served delicious breakfasts, and the owners were perfect guides to the city and its restaurants. The hip Café Parti was nearby and if could’ve eaten every lunch and dinner there, I would have. It served Belgian specialties that I’d sampled before in Brussels and Bruges, but they were exceptional, especially the stoofvlees, a beef stew made with dark beer, and the onglet, hanger steak better than any I’d had in the U.S.

I liked the modern lines of the hotel and the Café Parti (above) because Ghent has so much history in its architecture, from the Renaissance buildings along the canals, to the Romanesque St. Bavo Cathedral and the medieval Gravensteen fortress at the city center. Dipping in and out of these different periods was intensely enjoyable. And so was sampling my favorite Belgian chocolate, Neuhaus, and a Ghent specialty, neuzekes, candies filled with raspberry syrup that look like little pointed hats and are partly made with gum Arabic. They’re sensational.

Bikes are king in Ghent, or so they say, and it apparently has the largest bike-friendly zone in Europe. Ghent was the first city to designate a street as a “cycle street”—meaning that cars have to stay behind bikes. They’re everywhere, weaving through traffic and around the trams which snake along the sinuous streets which seem unlike any other street plan I’m familiar with from my previous years of visiting Western. There was something very calming about riding a tram or just watching one.

For a city which is the third largest port in Belgium, and has 250,000 residents, Ghent never felt overwhelming. It welcomed and fascinated me, and unlike the more famous Bruges half an hour away (which has twice as many tourists), it didn’t feel like a museum despite the amazing architecture from so many different periods.

Before I got there, I had plans to set a novel elsewhere in Flanders, but after this past week, the novel-in-progress has moved to Ghent.  Frankly, I wish I could, too.  For awhile, anyway….

Lev Raphael is the author of the memoir/travelogue My Germany and 24 other books in many genres. He speaks French, German, and some Dutch.