Suddenly town exploration starts from the port. It doesn't happen often to me.

I couldn't figure out how to write the city name in a correct way for quite a while. Half of the places does it as "Ostend", the second half as "Ostende". Well, let it be Ostend, like in wiki.

As it often happens, one of the central places in the city is cathedral. This one is unusual, cause right next to it there is a tomb of the very first Belgium Queen Maria Louisa.

Feels like close to Netherlands. Well, actually those lands once were Dutch lands.

Street shop. Even thought the weather wasn't the best for such a thing.

Local museum ship. It's a port city, so this is the right place.

There is a red light district right next to those ruins. With windows like in Amsterdam and with no photos allowed. However it's way too small: just a single building or so.

A great and tasty bouillabaisse fish soup. Even though it's a south region dish, it was perfect on the North as well.

Here you can buy the same soup, but much cheaper :)

Somewhere on this street there is the oldest building in the city. I argued a lot with my friends, but we didn't come to a agreement which one it was. Even maps with GPS didn't help us.

On the way back we unexpectedly ran into square with a kind of modern statues.

Right behind the square there was interesting park with sand sculptures. I've read about it before, but I had an impression it's just a temporary event held somewhere in summer. I didn't expect to see it in almost October.

It's funny that the entrance isn't free, but there is a fencer with huge spaces and you don't have to go inside to see almost everything. Only a few people pay and go inside. Majority give at a quick glance from the outside and leaves.

I arrived to the city by this ship. That's why I'd like to say a couple of words about port infrastructure.

When ship arrives to the port, normally the captain receives a pin token for access to local infrastructure and shares it with the team. In some ports it stays the same for years (:
So the pin is the key to access a shower, toilet and other things right in the port. It's not free, but it's a part of a fee the ship pays to stay. Sometimes the price might be a few hundreds euros per night. However in our case, it might be free sometimes as well, as the ship isn't commercial.

Ok, next post is about the ship. Finally.