Gabriel Ríos – "Broad Daylight" (2005)

‘Cause this here be going on 

Until it’s not . . .

And then a little more

The Belgian city of Bruges – which is probably the best-preserved medieval city in all of Europe – is a place that I’ve wanted to visit for years.  

According to one travel writer, “If you set out to design a fairy-tale medieval town, it would be hard to improve on central Bruges.”

The Belfry of Bruges

The medieval belfry (bell tower) of Bruges is the city’s most famous building.  It’s featured prominently in the 2008 movie titled In Bruges:

Longfellow wrote a poem titled “The Belfry of Bruges,” which begins with these lines:

In the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry old and brown;

Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o'er the town.

The belfry was seriously damaged by fires in 1280, 1493, and 1741 – hence the “Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded” line.

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When I went to Bruges last month, I wasn’t disappointed – far from it.  But I don’t understand why the nearby city of Ghent doesn’t get a little more love.  

Like Bruges, Ghent has plenty of centuries-old canals, churches, cobbled streets, and distinctive step-gabled buildings.  

It has a belfry, too.  The belfry of Ghent (which was built between 1313 and 1380) is about 25 feet taller than the belfry of Bruges.

The Belfry of Ghent

What Ghent doesn’t have are the crowds of tourists that can overwhelm Bruges on a summer’s day.

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In early July, the days in Ghent are well over 16 hours long.  It doesn’t really get dark until around 11:00 pm.

Like Bruges, Ghent is full of buildings with stepped gables, the oldest of which date from the 12th and 13th centuries.  Here are a few examples:

The combination of step-gabled buildings, canals, and twilight skies is impossibly picturesque:

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I don’t think Bruges has anything like Ghent’s enormous Gravensteen castle, which dates back to 1180:

And Bruges doesn’t have anything like the Ghent Festival, an outdoor music and theatre festival that attracts some two million visitors to Ghent every July.

The Ghent Festival kicked off the day after my group was scheduled to leave the city and return to the U.S.  Construction crews were racing to complete dozens of outdoor stages and beer gardens while we were there.

Every Belgian brewery that I had ever heard of and a number of those I hadn’t heard of were represented at the festival.  The event’s organizers had arranged for hundreds of these urinals to be placed on the streets:

I realize that these urinals do relatively little to shield passers-by from the sight of men emptying their bladders.  But otherwise hundreds of thousands of beer-sodden young men would have been indiscriminately peeing everywhere – much like male dogs.

I’m not sure where all the beer-sodden young female festival-goers were supposed to go.

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about my last night in Ghent.  (SPOILER ALERT: I did my laundry.)

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Gabriel Ríos was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to Ghent when he was 17 to study painting.  He subsequently pivoted from art to music and quickly became a big deal on the local music scene.

“Broad Daylight” was a single from Ríos’s first album, Ghostboy, which was released in 2005.  

Click here to listen to “Broad Daylight.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon.