A Trip Across the Harbour and a Night Out with the Family

One afternoon David and I got the little free ferry across the harbour to the slightly wilder side of Oostende.
Its where the fishing boats are and the fish is sold.

There are clear reminders of war here.

Including a bunker built by Napolean!

Which has been decked out with a restaurant. I mean, can you think of a nicer place to eat an overpriced dinner?

We went inside, a bit, because to go any further we would have to pay and David became very disheartened with the fake coin machine. It wasn’t one of the squashing ones :(

It was a nice day, so we wandered over the sand dunes and then checked out the fishing boats. I think somebody was getting a bit nostalgic…

On friday night we came here again as part of a demonstration against the proposal of pulling down the fish market to build more flats or holiday lets or something.

It would be a shame, Oostende has so little heritage left, you would have thought they would want to preserve as much as possible.

It took us a little while to actually find the demonstration, which is never a great start… There were quite a few people though, I’m not great at guessing, but I would say over a hundred. Which on reflection, isn’t that many really…

It was funny.
We all stood around for the speeches surrounded by people with glow sticks, lanterns and fire tourches. Which were almost burnt out by the end of the speeches. Then a marching band appeared! It drummed away and we watched, a photo was taken and then they walked off drumming until someone pointed out that perhaps we should follow them. We marched around, through the big corridor of said building, which smelt strongly of fish and amplified the drumming. I can’t blame Jorick for getting a head ache. We came to the end of our walk at a stool selling delicious fried fish simply on a bit of bread. Some kind of sole I think, there were no bones and mine was a little crispy which I liked :)

The next part of the evenings plan was to see a band at a little gallery near home but we turned up and it looked closed. Jorick celebrated, until we realised it wasn’t. Then there were no tickets left anyway, so he celebrated again. We wandered into town and place after place were closed. By now it became quite a joke that Jorick had put some spell on them. He wanted to go home.

But we battled on to the city centre, which isn’t far at all, like 10 to 15 mins walk, and found a great little bar with a huge mixture of music. Ranging from Manu Chau to Tom Odell. The whole family seem to know all the words to every song! Especially the daughters. They battle for the names of artists and often yell out names in unison.

It was such a nice atmosphere with everyone chatting away and guessing songs, which David and I were hopeless at, some dancing and lots of laughing.

It was about time we tried some Belgian beer. We already had french fries. Which are called that because apparently frying is also called frenching. Huh, spellcheck doesn’t agree that is a word… Well, thats what a belgian told me anyway!
Those who know me, yes because its not just friends and family following my blog anymore ;) will know I’m not a fan of beer. Which is to put it nicely. So Kris, the dad, chose me a girly cherry beer, which was pretty good, kind of similar to cider but more err… Full bodied? I don’t know how to explain it. David tried a few different beers, everyone did, like trying wines, everyone takes sips of each others and talks about them. They all come in different glasses, some remarkably like wine glasses down to the tall thin stem. I was surprised to find I quite liked a couple of beers. They are much higher in alcohol than what we are used to in the UK and Portugal, at about 9% and don’t make me feel so bloated. Some are even kind of creamy on the palet. There are hundreds of beers here, god knows how people can remember them. Then again, no different from wine I guess…