We arrived at Gare du Nord pretty early, so we had time for a nice breakfast right outside the train station.
It was delicious! And….only in France would they ask you at breakfast if you would like a beer. Of course!
Then we boarded the train to Belgium. It didn’t take long to get there, maybe 2 hours at the most? The countryside was pretty.
Once we arrived at the train station in Ghent, we ran into some brothers and sisters that were welcoming delegates. It was so nice to see friendly faces.
We hopped into a cab (again…we could have taken the tram, but didn’t want to mess with it with our luggage) and the cab dropped us right off at our hotel. We were greeted at our hotel by some witnesses and we got all checked in and were given our welcome bags with our itinerary. Also included was a bag, a jw.org business card holder, a jw memories booklet, a pen, and a calendar.
The significance of the calendar didn’t really hit me until a few days later. It’s drawn in ‘cartoon’-ish style…when I first saw it I thought it was a bit random, but then when we toured Brussels a few days later, we learned that cartoons have a big history in Belgium (Rin Tin Tin came from Beligum) so cartoons are a pretty big deal there.
Then because we were so tired, we walked across the parking lot to have dinner at Ikea. I’m not kidding. We just didn’t have it in us to go back into town and we wanted to be refreshed and ready for our busy day the next day. We all agreed not to tell anyone that at our first night in Belgium we ate at Ikea. And here I am blogging about it ha ha.
It was nice to get all settled in and unpacked for our final week in Europe!
