Pokey Buildings: A Ballad of Gent

...and the peace didn't last. On Monday night I received word that a dear friend of mine had fallen at Hawksbill Crag. Since I'm still in some kind of subconscious denial I'm not gonna say much besides that I love and miss her so much. She is one of the most important people I've ever come across. And I don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day. 

And the only thing keeping me together right now is the beautiful city of Gent and the beautiful people on this study abroad trip with me. 

Quick question: why do people never talk about Gent? Why on Earth haven't I always been told that this is one of the coolest cities in the galaxy? Because it certainly is. The Northern Renaissance style coupled with all of the overly intricate Gothic architecture just has its way with me. I joke in the title that all of the buildings are very pokey, and it is totally true. These structures, through some pseudo-divine inspiration were built mostly in the 1400-1600s and are still towering over the cobblestone. I'm truly dumbfounded as to how these things were built in just around 100 years without any modern construction equipment or mathematical computation instruments. I'm looking at them right now from the hostel window and am truly amazed. 

On Tuesday we went to a small, family-owned vineyard and studied a bit of the tiny Belgian wine industry. It is hard to grow grapes this far north so it was very interesting to see the methods of production. After the wine stuff, we went to Ypres to study The Great War at the Western front line. WW1, as Dan Carlin calls it, was a "blueprint for the apocalypse." The level of destruction and amount of lives lost is truly astounding. Though I still have full idealistic faith in humanity, this excursion definitely rattled it. Standing at a site where 60,000 people died from chlorine gas over the course of four hours is something that will rattle you to your very core. Also, finally getting a good visual on the trenches from the war was extremely interesting. I, in my last post called Finals hellish, I clearly didn't fight in WW1. 

I'm in a hurry now to head to a "Jazzy" place with a native Belgian and some of the study abroad folks so need to wrap this up. 

So, lastly, education: We have had several lectures regarding food chain sustainability in the Eurozone and today we visited VIB (Flemish institute of biotechnology). My favorite lecture thus far was the GMO lecture today. Our lecturer was a world expert in the field of GM crops. She gave a definitive explanation on how they work and why they definitely shouldn't be blindly feared. GM crops are some of the humanity's most powerful and clever inventions and the only reports that paint them in a negative light are based purely on pseudoscience. 

Okay, I'm sure the next blog post will be more in depth on BioEngineering side of this endeavor and how I am now considering graduate school in Gent. But jazz is calling. As is ever so on the road.