My trip to Belgium, pt.1

It was on this random day of the end of June in the middle of our picnic, that we thought about how long it had been since we'd had holiday together. Two years. I remember asking if anyone wanted to go to Amsterdam to see all the flowers and tulip fields. We needed to have one last trip together before we would be apart. I was leaving for the UK and one of my friends was leaving for the South of France, which might not seem too far but is a pretty long way.

We had two issues: we could only go for three days at the most and we were broke.

Back home, we started to look at places to stay but everything was out of our budget as lockdown was finally over and our holiday was in less than two weeks. So we thought of a solution, a compromise. That's how we found this lovely town "Gand" (Gaunt) in North Beligum, in the Flemish Region. It was the perfect place to be a substitute of Amsterdam: flowers everywhere, the river crossing the town and the typical (Belgium) architecture. Stunning.

We thought one day would be enough to see most of Gand and we planned the rest of the trip which was one day in Brussels. It seems short, I agree, but as we were travelling on a really tight budget, we couldn't afford to stay longer or we would have ended up sleeping in the car. After a few days of intense thinking, the trip was planned and booked. We would arrive in Gand on the evening of the 25th of July, stay for two nights in an Airbnb and leave for Brussels early in the morning of the 27th.

We found the cheapest Airbnb we could, a bedroom in a house located five minutes walk from the town centre. We knew from the photos and the price that it wasn't a Five Stars Airbnb with the most aesthetic interior, but it was so much worse what we were expecting. We arrived at our destination around 11pm and we were welcomed by our host. So far, nothing wrong about it. He was nice and guided us to his house.

That is when things became weird. The house had a really strong and unpleasant smell, as if the windows had stayed shut for months. Our room was on the top floor, the attic. We had to open a hatch and be very careful on the stairs as the steps were really small, but that wasn't even the worst part of it. The room! On the right, a double bed stood next to a huge wardrobe with creepy stuffed toys and clowns on top of it. On the left was a small partition to hide the toilets and sink behind, with no door to separate them from the bedroom. Diagonal to the toilets was a single bed for the third guest, with a special view on the dirty toilets and the fish tank filled with black and smelly water. It was so bad that our only reaction was to laugh, so we wouldn't cry and I didn't even mention the upside down fan hanging by its foot to one of the beams on top of the bed. Yes, on top of the bed. Our worst nightmare was imagining that it would just fall off on one of us during the night.

Tired from our journey, we decided to simply have a quick shower before bed. We thought we had seen everything about the Airbnb, but the room was only the beginning. The shower, located on the ground floor, was so small and dirty that we thought about showering in the river in front of the house. Huge spiders were hanging in the corners and I think I have never showered faster than those few days there. As using the toilets from the bedroom, or going down the deadly stairs in the middle of the night were not conceivable options, we had no other choice but to use the ones near the shower, in the garage. The more things we had to do in the house, the worse it was getting. Just going to the toilets or showering was a nightmare. A disgusting nightmare. We could literally see the toilet seat from behind the door through a huge gap.

We finally got into bed, the three of us sleeping in the same double bed as there was no way we would let one of us sleep alone on the single bed, facing the toilets.

After a sigh of relief to finally be in bed, we thought we would have a really good night. That was without counting on the mosquitos biting us the whole night. Happily for us, the following days were much better!

Look for the part 2 to read about the rest of our adventures in Belgium!