Day 8: How did I get here?

One of the ways that we have saved on food costs is going to grocery stores to purchase pastries for breakfast, pre-made sandwiches for lunch, and other assorted things like fruit, granola bars, and beverages for the rest of the day. This allows us to go out for dinner wherever we happen to go. Also, our dining experiences have vastly improved since we started using Trip Advisor to research our dining options. The time spent researching restaurants has been a worthwhile experience. A few of the better places we have had dinner at were Gruuthuse Hof (http://www.gruuthusehof.be/) in Brugge, De Werf (http://www.dewerf-leuven.be/) in Loeven, and Gdanska (http://www.gdanska.be/) in Oberhausen.

Unless we have something in our schedule that has been set in stone, we have been booking our hotels only a day in advance. Urban exploration can be a finicky hit or miss business. We have now seen most of places that we wanted to see so our pace is no longer quite so frantic. Our days are more relaxed, whew!

Today was definitely a relaxed day. We started by going to the grocery store near our hotel to purchase a few pastries and coffees for breakfast. We also picked up a few pre-made sandwiches for lunch. Bart even managed to find a flashlight to replace the one that mysteriously disappeared a few days ago. We packed up and headed back on the road. We only had one destination in mind for the day. The multi-building complex was originally a fort that was eventually repurposed into a jail and then later on into a hospital.

The buildings were located behind a gated area that was close to an active school. We could hear the children laughing, screaming, playing, and being generally noisy on their school grounds behind a tall hedge fence.  We walked through the open gate and proceeded into the closest building. It was three stories tall with long dark corridors. The building had been abandoned long enough for small trees to have grown inside some of the rooms and staircase landings. There were no furnishings, but there was plenty of rubble and rubbish strewn about. The one building we explored had multiple staircases and they were all a little different. There were a few interesting simple murals on some interior room walls. While we were doing a walk through the main floor, we heard footsteps echoing down one of the staircases from a floor above. We never saw the person or persons while we were there.  When we finished we decided that we did not need to explore the other buildings, they were very likely the same. When we left the property, we noticed that someone had closed the gate. Not again! Lucky for us, the gate was only closed and not chained shut. We returned to the car, ate our sandwiches, and went on our merry way.