Emotions on pedals - day 3&4
The following day was dedicated to the beauty of this student town full of old buldings and bridges. The morning is spent on our own, the afternoon in the company of locals, guiding us to a secret monastery at the border of town. In the evening we are alone again, in full freedom of wandering around, hunting for live music performances, which we need as vampires needs fresh blood… and approaching young ladies at any occasion to ask for improbable information. This is indeed Teo’s specialty. The quantity and quality of bullshits we were able to say to a group of incredulous girls in the “Hot Club de Gand” was truly impressive. Spreading happiness and freedom. But the day was to be ended with a close encounter with the police. We could do nothing but bow our heads in front of an angry policewoman barking for a good 10 minutes at Matteo, guilty of a triple crime: running a red light, slightly outside of the bike path, with no lights on…How angry was she after discovering we did not even speak Flemish! We were so scared that when she asked we are we from, there was a general silence…! Considering that on his first day in Brussels Matteo already managed to get a bike sequestered by the cops for running a red, we drew a big sigh of relief when they let us go with our wallets intact.
On the Wednesday we finally managed to leave Gent along a nice canal in the open countryside, which is going to lead us all the way into Bruges. All goes smoothly apart from when the path ended and we found ourselves having to walk on the river banks for a couple of miles. Bruges is small and quiet. The post-card architecture reminds me of my beloved Cambridge. For the first time, we spent a night in a hostel, where we became well known for our Italian cooking skills, as Matteo was creating a vegetarian cous cous, while I was busy chatting with an Australian girl. She was a beer expert and long-winded speaker, but at some point disappeared to go to dinner with her parents. So we hit the town, but (as I was fearing) the coefficient of fun of Brugge was really low.. only one decent bar, where we were approached by a Costarican girl, who also loooved to talk. Do we have the faces of good listeners?
