One of the pleasures of working in the software consulting world is that you never know where your customers may take you…and in November, we had the opportunity to visit a FullCity Consulting customer who has an office in Belgium. It was a great excuse for my friend and colleague, FullCity Consulting President Adam, to bring his daughter Julia on her first oversees trip; since Julia was coming we decided to make it a family affair, bringing Jeff & Dashiell along.

We started with a quick tour of Düsseldorf essentials: a trip up the Rhineturm (we’d been waiting for visitors as an excuse to do this oursleves!), window shopping on the Kö, and of course lots of bread and bakery items.

Then it was time to pack up and make the efficient 2-hour train journey to Brussels.

I hadn’t been to Belgium since I was 16 (backpacking with Audrianna on that big summer tour!) but Jeff goes to Brussels every year for a technical conference, so he was our tour guide for the time we spent in the capital. We decided to bed down in Ghent, which is smaller and more charming. I’m glad we did; Ghent turns out to be like a small Paris. It seems everywhere we looked there were Instagram-ready sites: patisseries, narrow cobblestone streets, cafes in small squares, European haute couture in the shop windows.

We managed to fit in quite a bit of sight seeing, have our meeting, and relax as well. We stayed at a truly unique AirB&B that one has to see to believe, located in a gem of modern architecture right in the old part of downtown. In Ghent, we had an excellent meal, visited a castle right smack-dab in the middle of the town (that had an excellent and quite funny audio guide – see picture of Jeff laughing in the castle), and we of course partook in those famous Belgian waffles at every opportunity.

Ghent is definitely a place to re-visit; it’s small and most of the sites can be seen in a day, but the joy would be in just relaxing at a canal-side cafe and people watching!