Gent was the perfect town for a pause between the hustle&bustle of Amsterdam and Paris. It's a barely-there medieval village, strategically built so that its canals worked as moats for the castle.
There is a huge student population in Gent; and they have a fantastic modern art&design museum ('Fantastic' is totally word-of-mouth. I didn't hear about it until the day we were leaving and that's a definite bummer). Anyway because of all this young hipness, the buildings are old, but the residents have learned to make that a simple backdrop for the modern interior design they clearly appreciate.
We fit in perfectly as 20-somethings meandering around in the afternoon sunshine, soaking up what was apparently the only two days of Spring in months of almost-constant rain. In the evenings, twilight lasted until midnight, and so we joined the groups of people dangling their feet over the water and sipping wine out of plastic cups.
The only touristy thing we did (besides take 100000 photos of windows&doors) was to climb the old watchtower, running up 256 steps to test our Colorado lungs at sea level. We had the place mostly to ourselves, and we stood on the observation deck and commented how the red brick roofs reminded us both of Boulder. We noticed the stairs climbed higher, so we followed them up to a locked gate. Never much into 'rules,' we simply climbed over&through the gate. We made it to the top of the stairs and onto the roof, just in time to watch the 4 o'clock bells chiming in front of us--the only other audience member was a gold weathervane dragon. Definitely weren't supposed to be up there but, hey, no one was there to tell us no. :)
Our hotel was fabulous and adorable, run by the cutest girl ever in the world who asked me where she could buy my Vera Bradley duffle bag (so of course I loved her instantly). We wasted a lot of hours making conversation with strangers&eating&drinking too much at the Irish pub downstairs, where the entire staff was transplanted from the Emerald Isles. There were 40 types of Irish whiskeys on the menu, and we sampled more than a few on bartender recommendations.
I can't say we did too much more than that in Gent. But we were happy there. We walked circles around the city. We explored. We slept in. We went shopping. I ate chocolate (I'm getting visibly plumper every day!) I'd like to go back some day. Until then, here's some of those 100000 photos I mentioned.
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