Detours continued: On our way to Ghent!

For our blog followers....and those who have asked :) we will give a little more info on our location of this wonderful tour.
So for the previous blog, we were in Rotterdam, Holland...A wonderful little city only about an hour or so south of Amsterdam...it is famous for its architecture and we also came across a couple of its amazing bridges..
So as we purchased our train tickets from Rotterdam to Ghent, we discovered that our connector train (which landed us in Anwerp, Belgium) only gave us 5 minutes to get to our train heading towards our final desintaiton of Ghent! And of course, keeping with the tradition, we managed to miss that train and had to wait 40 minutes for the next train to Ghent. The wait was not so much a hastle, since Katie managed to get a little bit sick, so we took advantage of the 40 minutes! We caught the train to Ghent and once we arrived there we had no idea how to get to our courch surfing host (Thomas) house. All we had was his address and phone number (which really was just a bunch of long numbers jotted down on our notebook page) and his suggestion that if we arrive to his place and he is not there, he says "Just ask a stranger to use their phone to call me and I will come meet you at my house!"
So after staring at a city map for about 5 minutes, and trying to discover where this Thomas lived, we said, "Looks close, let walk!" And to our surprise, it was far from close! We wandered around this "college town" known as Ghent, for a good 1/2 hour until we decided that we needed to ask for directions. We came across a Shell station and the attendant managed to give us clear directions to the street we were headed.
At this point it had become a very long travel day and the dark, ostentatious clouds were looming! We finally made it to Thomas' place (which isn't even where we were sleeping--his wonderful friends were letting us stay at their place, since Thomas lives in an apartment the size of our kitchen!) but with our luck, Thomas was not there because since we missed both of our trains, we ended up being in Ghent two hours later than what we told Thomas. So now it was time to use Thomas' advice on asking a stranger to use their phone!
Well, it didn't really work out as easy as Thomas wrote it in our e-mail. We ended up sitting outside his place, playing damsels in distress for a few minutes, but quickly discovered we were not getting anywhere staring at each other. So we decided to find a place to put our heavy packs down and eat. We found a nice little sandwhich place around the corner. After feeling a bit rejuvenated, we knew that we only had one option, and that was to finally ask a stranger to use their cell phone to call Thomas! Luckily there were some boys at the retaurant eye-ing us and after a few minutes of '' You go talk to them," "no, YOU go ask them," Katie got up, walked over, plopped down next to them.
She told them her sob story about how she is from the other side of the world and her train was late and now her friend she is staying with isn't home and oh by the way, Can she use you cell phone?! Ther verdict..YES! We called Thomas and he met us at his place where we then walked to his friends house that we would be staying at. Their names are Nick, Stan and Stefan. They live on the top floor of an old creaky building with a lot of character. Out the windows you can see the Gavensteen Castle and 3 giant church towers about 8 blocks away. It couldn't be in a more convenient part of town. And even better, almost all of the guys study architecture at the University! Fantastic! :) So we have perused through their models and textbooks...
We talked about where we plan to visit in Blegium and then got ready to go out. Thomas took us to a bar right near the house and introuduced us to 3 good Belgian beers: the Quack, the Duvel (or devil) and the third escapes our memory. After that we went to a Jazz bar(where we aparently missed the jazz) and met a whole group of their friends, who are also architecture students! We stayed and talked there until about 1:30 when the gang was rearing to go to another bar and we went home and passed out!