Sometimes you are unavoidably confronted with your own middle age. As we were walking through the amazing center of Ghent, a store window caught my eye. I made a little noise of delight and trotted across the street. I was staring intently and happily at the window when Meredith came up behind me, saying, “Husband…” in a tone that meant something, but I was not sure why. I said, “Yes?” and was asked what I was looking at. I told here I was admiring the two models of the P-51 Mustang airplanes in the window, which she pointed out were right next to (and I do mean right next to) the large display of black and white postcards of nude women. I never noticed.

This morning, we took the train from Paris to Brussels, which takes about eighty minutes. We then transferred to a train to Ghent, which took about twenty-five minutes. During that time, a polite Belgian asked us where we were from, and so we started talking. From what I gathered though his good, but heavily accented, English, he has started his own bank with his own currency that would be legal tender anywhere, allowing for better exchange of goods and (more importantly to him) ideas and understanding. He gave me a one euro (?) dollar (?) mark (?) bill. He was very insistent that we should love ourselves and then everyone else, and that being joyful was the key to good health. He then helped Mer get her luggage off the train. A nice man, with an enormous dream.

We took a tram from the train station to the historic center of Ghent, and then found our hotel, which is a converted monastery; the room that Meredith booked for us is really large and really nice. I told Mer there must be some mistake, since I usually am the one splurging for nice digs. We actually didn’t see the room until later in the afternoon – since it was 12:30, we were too early to check in, so we dropped our bags and went back into town for lunch.

Ghent is pretty amazing. The town was founded on the confluence of two small rivers, and there are a few canals off the rivers as well. People use the waterways for touring and pleasure, and it adds to the charm of the town. There are about 8,127 churches (Ghent used to be very wealthy and was an important city), and there are lots of cute shops and restaurants.

After lunch and getting checked in to the hotel, we went to Ghent’s cathedral, Saint Bavo’s. St. Bavo was a seventh-century lord who, after his wife died young, donated all his wealth to the poor and became a hermit. The church is quite interesting inside. It is very vertical-feeling, with a ton of open space and a one-hundred-foot-high ceiling. The altar and pulpit are ornate, and there is a good amount of decent art in the church. There are some odd and important things in the church too.

In one chapel is a statue of Father Damien, who ministered to lepers in Hawaii in the 1800s. His statue is quite lifelike, so I kept being startled when I kept seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I looked around the church.

In about 2015, a small whale was hit by a cargo ship, and the whale died. It washed up in Ghent. What do you do with the remains of a whale? You strip it down to the skeleton and hang it in the cathedral, of course. The church is using it to tie in to the Biblical story of Jonah (and the whale). Can’t say I’ve ever seen a whale skeleton in a church before.

There is a paining of Bavo by Paul Rubens that is very good. The most important art, though, is the altarpiece The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. This huge altar painting is by the Van Eyck brothers, and it was the first painting done in oil by a master artist (around 1425). The detail is exquisite, and based on real human bodies, and must have been shocking and startling to see when it was dedicated. It also has a mystery attached – one of the panels was stolen in 1935, and an exchange was agreed on, but before the panel was returned, the man who claimed to know where it was had a heart attack, and his last words were something to the effect of, “My office – bottom drawer, key.” They found the key, but no one has been able to find the panel, so it is still missing. The panel has been replaced by a copy, but people are still looking for the original.

It was about 5:00, and we knew we would be eating late, so we grabbed some gelato before walking to a small street at the edge of the historic district, where we attended a small church service. Looking online, Mer had found an English-speaking church (Every Nation Ghent). We went, and it was geared toward the considerable college-aged population of this university town. I’m pretty sure we were the oldest people in the room, but it was fine. We sang some songs, and heard a sermon from an Austrian woman who lives in Spain with her Filipino husband. Every Nation Ghent indeed! The people were quite friendly, and we got to chat with a young woman who is in residency for pediatric care. It is good to go to church in a different country – it helps remind you God is bigger than America, and lets you see natives in a normal setting (besides shops and museums).

From there, it was supper and home. Mer took it easy on me today, getting me back around 9:30. She probably wanted to keep me from gawking at more shop windows.