Ghent

[ewx]

We had a day trip to Ghent. Where Brussels has St Michael, Ghent prefers dragons. This is the Belfort, topped by one:

Inside, an earlier model:

Bell with N for scale:

The carillon can be driven from a keyboard or a drum:

Practice keyboard for the carillon (notice the small bells inside):

Ghent has bendy busses and trams (we used the latter):

Sint-Niklaaskerk:

More Ghent.

Design museum. The basement was very chair-themed:

Some of the display cases had these little figures in:

Chair by Allesandro Mendini. Opposite the chair was a video of the creator sitting in it, apparently on a roof, explaining his thoughts.

More design museum.

We visited the Gravensteen, literally “castle of the count”.

View south from Gravensteen. Neptune stands over the entrance to the fish market.

By the river. I’ve no idea.

More castle.

(“Ghent” is the English spelling; in Flemish it’s spelled “Gent”, and in French “Gand”).

All holiday articles:

1. Brussels
2. Ghent
3. Bruges
4. Food

Comments

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

"SEARCH AND DESTROY" - I know this one, because I asked our tour guide. It's part of a temporary art exhibition around the town. The artist noted the absence of the effects of war historically in Ghent (apparently the mayors in both World Wars just invited the Germans in on the agreement that they wouldn't damage anything!) and decided to include this American military strategy term as an installation outside the old meat market, so that Ghent would contain some reference to military history. Strange, isn't it?

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Ghent we didn't get to back in the day (we did do a day-trip to Bruges.) I wonder if English put the 'h' in 'Ghent' to make it clear it's a hard-g and/or distinguish it from gent(leman). Oh, and I love Naath's rainbow top :-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but I think a more likely explanation is that it was formerly pronounced in English the same way as it is in Flemish, i.e. with an initial /ɣ/ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative), and that when that sound was lost from English, the spelling in English didn’t change to match.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Ah that does sound likely, thank you for the information!