As anyone working night-shifts can testify to, when you work late, your body clock changes. You become a strange nocturnal being that stays up until morning and wakes up in the afternoon. This is not a very healthy or productive cycle, but it is an inevitable part of living on the other side of the day. So it was for me in my first week. With no defences or strategy for dealing with it, I became a kind of bat that finished my ‘real’ shift rotation customarily at one or two o’ clock and then went out afterwards. Happily for me, unlike London, Ghent is indeed a place that has dozens of options for really late night partying. In fact, when I arrive at a party at two o’ clock in the morning, I have found that I can skim the best of the party, like cream from milk, and greedily drink it down without sacrificing anything too much. In fact, I believe that something truly alchemical occurs at a good party after the witching hour of two or three. Those who are drunk are drunk, those who want love have found it, those who are bored go home. So what is left? A kind a alluvial residue, like the hops fermenting in the grainy sedimentation at the bottom of vats of Belgian beer. These are the people who do not know what they want, or who have found it. There is a kind of joyful unity involved in being part of this group of morning revellers; even though everyone desperately longs for something. Perhaps it is also paradoxical this sense of camaraderie you feel: the sense of belonging among those who do not belong anywhere, the misfits. It is not a coincidence that I have used two alimentary metaphors in one paragraph. For going out is all about the appetites really, and the pursuit of good taste (literal not metaphorical) is one of the guiding principles of the universal human condition.
As with my first night in the Volks Huis, the former Socialist party headquarters of Ghent, for the past ten days Arnaud has generously acted like my nocturnal events mastermind. Without fail when I checked my phone after finishing a shift I would have received a text with an address and a name of a venue: it was then down to me, my bicycle and ingenuity to find it. Often these venues were in very obscure locations, even by local standards, sometimes in the red light district, sometimes in the deep South of the city beyond the outer stadsring or motorway. One place the Café Carol, a small squat, was tucked down at the end of a dark alleyway lit with tea-lights; another – El Negocito – was at the end of a tramline and road of cobblestones that led away from my pub.
El Negocito
I would like to write a little about El Negocito because it strikes me as the kind of bar that does not exist at all in London, or for that matter, in many cities in Europe.
El Negocito was opened by a man of Chilean origin who moved to Ghent twenty years ago. It is located in the heart of the red light district, amid a web of garish neon lights. It is not a part of town that has much to offer (except the obvious), and yes, prostitution is rife in Ghent.
As soon as you enter this rather large, gloomy bar with palatially high ceilings, you cannot help but be seduced by its atmosphere. Like the ‘ruined bars’ of Budapest it gives the impression that it might at any moment tumble down into a heap of rubble, but is held together by some unlikely charm. The floor of the bar is strewn with large wooden tables and stools, and candles wedged into old wine bottles gutter in the darkness. The tables are big enough, and indeed designed, for everyone to mingle together. The sense of community and friendship fostered by El Negocito cannot help but evoke the ghost of some revolutionary spirit from the past – some long forgotten dream. So if you montage the vision of Fidel Castro and the muted, shadowy talk of Camus together, you will get to El Negocito.
That night I was there only with Francoise and Arnaud and a group of merry Cypriots. Everyone I met was genial: the chef Carlos who embraced Arnaud and gave Orphee a gruff pat on the head, his son , the barman. It was a bar in which, as Arnaud proclaimed happily, by far more Spanish was spoken than Dutch. Arnaud himself was in an effusively good mood, his eyes shined at me as I entered: ‘Hello Katya!” And I was happy too because I had rattled my way along cauterized cobblestones my way in the dead of night towards the most hospitable and warm place I had yet found in Ghent.
So, yes, there has been a lot of partying, a little flirtation, many drunken walks back along the river and even some acrobatic bicycle riding back home past Dampoort. Yet the hangovers from Belgian beer (beer with some of the highest alcohol content in the world), are almost unimaginably bad, and so I have learnt the hard way that it is very easy to enjoy yourself in Ghent but the consequences can be, well, considerable.
833 words a day 