Kevin Runs Europe: Day 12

Distance: 9.0 miles (14.6 km)

Our plan for today was to go to Lille, France sometime around noon, spend the day and a night there, then catch the train the next morning to Paris... but we met a girl, a German girl named Janika. She was staying in our hostel and we got to talking at breakfast, and we all decided we'd go explore Gent some more together. We stopped at a cafe for some beers for a couple hours, where I accidentally ordered a pink cranberry-flavored "beer" for women. Always ask the waiter what you're ordering! After chugging that I quickly ordered a dark, delicious, high-alcohol-content, manly beer. We were joined by a crazy old man from Gent who was once a photographer that traveled the world but now spends his time sitting with random strangers and going off on long diatribes about how 9/11 was a US government conspiracy. As entertaining as that was, I told him we needed to be going. We then went to do about the only thing there is to do in the city center of Gent... look at the churches again. The great thing about cathedrals and churches in Europe is that they house some of the best art and architecture in the world and they are (usually) free to enter. As an art-appreciating, architecture-loving, practicing Catholic, I feel perfectly at home in a cathedral (though one doesn't have to be religious at all to appreciate them), and that day I was lucky enough to be with two people that seemed to like them too. We then got some food in the Vleeshuis (Meat Hall or Butcher's Hall).

All in all, we really enjoyed Gent. We probably should have stayed another night, but we had already booked our hostel in Lille, which happened to be a convenient stop on the way to Paris. However, the location of our hostel a mile from the train station made it not so convenient. After walking a mile there, I went for my run. My ankle still bothered me a little bit, but running actually made it feel better. I ran to the citadel of Lille, which, as far as I can tell, is about the only really cool thing in Lille. It's basically a giant pentagonal-shaped set of fortifications built in the 1600s as part of a series of similar fortifications along the French-Belgium border (then the French and Spanish-Flanders border). The Citadel was called the "Queen of Citadels" at the time and was virtually impenetrable. Not a single wall of the citadel could be approached by the enemy without being in the line of fire from another wall. Today, the middle of the citadel is still occupied by a branch of the French Army, but the surrounding outer "layers" are a very confusing labyrinth of paths and moats and walls where all the runners in Lille seem to choose to run (probably because it's the only good place to run). If it weren't for the dozens upon dozens of other runners I met, I would have felt like I was running through the ruins of an ancient lost city in the forest. The walls are overgrown with thick vegetation and it's extremely easy to get lost among the various little paths that shoot off into the trees.
After running through the citadel for a while, I ran through the city center to see the main squares and the cathedral (all nothing too special). When I finished, we just ate some food from a grocery store and hung out at the hostel, which was pretty neat. Our room was kind of like a treehouse with a rope ladder and everything!