178!

day 178! long day in Gent (or Ghent in english..whatever) today! I went with Manuella and her host mom. it was maybe an hour and a half drive, but on the way home tonight it was a lot longer because there was a lot of traffic. first we went to the design museum, it was everything from the 17th century bedrooms to new crazy couches and chairs. pretty interesting i suppose. different than going straight to the shopping street like i always do!

after the design museum we got a little lost looking for where we were to meet our "tour guide" for lunch and discovered this awesome graffiti passageway. i guess graffiti is allowed here and its always changing and overlapping, i think its really sweet! its like two blocks long too!

so when we walked into the lunch cafe place, i laughed really hard because they had the same sign my dad has as a magnet on his fridge back home in the usa... (maybe thats not something to be proud of, but i giggled).

after that we toured the gravensteen castle which was really cool! they had a special exibit over torture...so we also got to see a bunch of old swords and chains. my personal favorite was the guillotine they had on display. its all fake except the blade is really from a long time ago! i remember learning all about it last year in english class. maybe i'll send my english teacher an email, that would be neat. everyday i feel my "two lives" coming closer and closer together. learning about the guillotine in a classroom at brookings high school, then peeking my head out of one in the middle of belgium in a castle. cool huh?

overall it was a very good day! i was really happy to finally see what all the hype about Ghent is about. the hype is well deserved, and i'm sorry my pictures don't do it much justice but hopefully you get the gist of it all. well, super bad headache because i'm really tired. so goodnight, and thanks for reading. i'm up to over 12,000 views!!!!!!