9th September 2011 – Ghent, Belgium

Ghent offers plenty of opportunities for happily spending a potentially rainy day. There’s The Castle of the Counts – a toy town castle built by Philip of Alsace to demonstrate his might. There are The City Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, The Municipal Museum of Contemporary Arts, or The House of Alijin – a museum of popular culture to name just a few. So which did we choose? None other than The Guislain Museum. According to the extremely good Tourist Office brochure ‘you’d be ‘crazy’ not to pay it a visit’ – ‘A museum in Belgium’s oldest psychiatric hospital’ – ‘In this wonderful oasis you will find a permanent collection that illustrates the history of psychiatry and an international collection of outsider art or art brut.’

Suppose we should have guessed what it would be like when we arrived – the only ones there to visit the museum – all the other people were staff and patients of the psychiatric hospital. To anyone with the slightest tendency to depression my strong advice would be ‘keep away!’ G. found it interesting, but then he always takes a morbid interest in anything even slightly gruesome!  I was glad to get out. More like reading somebody’s dissertation than visiting a museum - apart from the end bit, which showed psychiatric wards and what seemed like torture implements from the hospital, unchanged from the end of nineteenth century. Only a masochist would choose this as a way of spending the second from last day of their holiday!

A brisk cycle into the city centre, and a mooch round the lovely streets had us back in holiday spirit (although we were both very conscious that our holiday was almost over so it was ‘end of holiday spirit’). Next time we’re in Ghent, we’ll stick to the more mainstream tourist attractions!