to infinity and ostend

When planning where to go and what to do on this particular holiday the proximity of Bruges to various sites of historical significance with particular reference to wars was noted but aside from noting that a daily bus trip was available we never made any moves along the lines of actually planning to visit any such sites. The purpose of holiday is to explore, relax, learn, walk and see and hear new things; being angered is not on the list. In the end the last Bruges-based day was used to pop to Ostend. I'd only ever heard of it as a place at the other end of ferry routes (much like Zeebrugge but without the Herald of Free Enterprise associations) but the information available about it seemed to imply it had sufficient things to make it a resort in its own right, as least as far as beaches went. It has either an aquarium or the museum equivalent of an aquarium but I now mistrust them after the appalling example visited in Napier, and this looked far far worse from the outside. There's the remains of an old churchy thing behind the new churchy thing but neither looked particularly receptive to visitors. There's a big casino thing covered with posters advertising a Demis Roussos gig but it didn't need the posters to prevent us entering it. In the end the surprisingly large and well-stocked modern art gallery did us fine for several hours. It's squeezed into an unremarkable residential street and looks like a former department store from the outside at ground level, though from the inside looks a bit like a department store and a bit like a multi-storey car park. As well as adding to the interest of the experience of walking around it the various mezzanines, nooks and crannies and different layouts of the same spaces on different floors meant that there were always a few extra bits to look round when a floor appeared to have been entirely covered. Lots of nice natural light to look at things by and a few nice lines full of bits of wall, though a few security guards meant I only tried getting a picture of it once. Various names noted in my phone as having produced items of interest include Félicien Rops, Leon Spilliaert, Jan de Maesschalk, Philip van Isacker and Pol Bury. A nice mix of painty-things, drawy-things and sculpty-things. There was perhaps a bit too much Paul Ensor (especially considering there's a museum of his stuff in his former house elsewhere in town) but as long as you work your way upwards through the floors it's over with soon enough. Definitely worth a trip from anywhere nearby, even including the train fare and entry fee combined.

As well as being good value for art galleries, 2.20 euros gets you what was described as a two-scoop ice-cream in a cone but which contained a lump of ice-cream about the size of both my fists combined which no amount of frenzied spooning and scraping with the wafer-thing stuck in the top could prevent from dripping slightly onto my hand and up my sleeve. Luckily we finished eating by the time we got to the beach where anything sticky would have ended up either blown onto the promenade pavement or coated in bits of sand. It was still a very nice beach, though some of the people neither flying kites nor walking along wondering who it was first used the term 'bracing' to describe being enfreshened by a lively wind containing little bits of sea and sand looked as if they maybe weren't enjoying themselves. I didn't hear any of them speaking sufficiently to be able to work out where they were from but it's very tempting to assume that anyone sitting huddled on a bench at the seaside in autumn looking cold and miserable is British. Despite the wind and occasional bursts of rain it was still just about T-shirt weather if you were moving fast enough or had one of those wind-breaker things which no-one on the beach appeared to have, not even the people sitting near the little beach-hut things.

Once back at the B&B, in order to facilitate getting to the station the next day (and in case it turned out that the 11am check-out time was strictly enforced) I took our largest rucksack stuffed with anything not deemed vital to overnight survival and morning preparation to the train station to dump in the left luggage lockers, checked out on a previous visit to assess reasonability of price and approximate security. Though I use such facilities only infrequently all those used previously have involved being given a little printout with a number on it for unlocking and retrieval. Though undoubtedly more modern, being given a printout with a barcode stamped on it to wave at a scanner makes safe storage of the bit of paper slightly more paramount in case it were to become illegible (and given the ease with which a few little creases can render a loaf of bread unscannable in the supermarket this doesn't seem impossible) and also creates the possibility that a printout could conceivably be warped enough to release the wrong locker when scanned. If such a thing happened, would the person alert the necessary staff and would the eventual outcome be the safe re-storage of the wrongly released item? As we would only be losing a few clothes and my second-best large rucksack (though the one with greater sentimental value or the two) it didn't worry me greatly but sometimes having a key (and the ability to lock and unlock and otherwise lightly test the storage facility without having to pay for it twice as I've seen people have to do at these things before after checking that their unlocking-code worked, not realising that the locker wouldn't care that it had only been in ten seconds rather than the maximum twenty-four hours) and having mechanical control of the locking mechanism (what would happen to these in a powercut?) feels a bit easier.

I had a last wander through all the old buildings and that on the way back just in case anything jumped out at me but the night-time lighting doesn't do a great deal for them. On a few things it's too uneven to be easily photographed, burning out next to the light before the bits further away have even registered. It's still a pleasant place to walk round and when it's theoretically only a ferry-ride away from home (albeit a ferry still far more expensive than it really needs to be unless you can travel eighteen people to a car (or can choose to have neither a cabin nor a stupid big chair thing as a foot-passenger), especially when the new operators vaguely promised "better value") there's no pressure to get of everything I might conceivably ever need a picture of. The work photo club competition is covered and I have at least four useable tourist shots of various things which will eventually be Flickr'd and conceivably even Blipfolio'd.