Oudenaarde

Flanders is full of tiny, quaint towns. This one is in East Flanders, a bit south-west of Gent. Thriving  population of 30,000. The town hall, built in the early 1520s, is very impressive if not excessive in detail and gothic-ness. The town's last golden age was in the 1500s, when apparently it was 'world' renowned for tapestry production.

They have cool mailboxes like Gent! Woo hoo! With Monika & Koen

Town Hall

Check out that detail

If I was an architect, I'd bring back this window style with a vengeance.

The Ominous Church

It's really funny going into churches in Europe with Europeans. I'm fascinated, they think I'm nuts and a silly American for being so interested in a church. Guess that's the tradeoff for not having anything monstrous gothic buildings hanging around from 500+ years ago in the US.

Koen is from a tiny Belgian town (well, from the looks of it, a farm...) and decided to show us around one of the town's he went school in while growing up. Oudenaarde is located about 20 or 30 minutes outside of Gent. We went into one of the towns massive (from my un-refined perspective) churches. Koen and Monika were, however, quite excited that I was actually interested in looking around and taking pictures, cause frankly, they were more or less bored at seeing just another church (in truth, they all begin to seem the same after you've seen 50 or more gothic churches).

This one stood out though, as it had all these ridiculous statues lining the main aisle. Each statue was an individual (probably each a particular saint) with a different weapon. I thought that seemed a bit violent for a church, but hey, it actually dates all the way back to the 12 century when the crusades were still going on, so who knows. 

This one is particularly mean. How would you like to pray with an axe pointed at your face?

Ceilings are always awesome, artistically and architecturally.

Church of Our Lady Pamele