Ghent Tourist Information Center

We were wandering rather aimlessly in the beautiful city of Ghent. It is quite different from Bruges which seemed to be a town stuck in time and maybe intentionally so since it is famous for being a medieval town. The trouble with this is that because of tourism pressure, the town will forever be stuck in the medieval ages since that is what the market wants. Ghent is not a tourist magnet like Bruges so it has the liberty to develop the city as it wants. I think they have managed to keep much of the old structure intact but they have also let new structures be built. It is thus said that it is not a museum town.

Unfortunately, this has led to a rather less well developed tourism infrastructure. I was half expecting to see a tourist information center at the train station but there wasn’t one. Getting to the city center from the train station was also a challenge since it wasn’t obvious which one to take. We actually took the wrong one before transferring to the right one. In our wanderings, we managed to stumble into the tourist information center. It was hidden in a corner near where the Gravesteen is. The building was rather impressive, if it wasn’t for that, we probably wouldn’t have noticed the place. There was an interactive display as well but we were just after some maps so that we know what to see here.

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