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<\/a>At about 10:30 I went out into town for my daily baguette<\/em>. And as I came to the pedestrian zone, this sign caught my eye. It lists everything that you are not allowed to do in the city, as far as local by-laws go, and the penalties that you can incur.<\/p>\nSo “use of alcohol in a public place”, “leaving litter”, “urinating” and “letting your dog foul the street” can cost you between \u20ac59 to \u20ac250.<\/p>\n
“Being drunk in public”, “Being under the influence of drugs”, “fighting” and “the bearing of arms” will result in a court appearance.<\/p>\n
And so you have been warned.
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The first undercover shopping gallery dates from the Middle Ages and is in Brussels – we’ve visited it on several occasions during the past. And here’s another Belgian shopping gallery, in Oostende. You never saw an American shopping mall looking as nice as this.<\/p>\n And why is shopping in North America so boring? Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops you’ve seen a mall. And do you remember that pile-driver that we saw in the pedestrian street on Saturday? Going past it this morning, I noticed that it had grown a little higher and there were a few extra bits attached. It’s now a crane. Also down there is the station building, although the trains don’t stop there now. They pull up about 50 yards short – you can see the modern roof of the train shed on the right-hand edge of the photo.<\/p>\n The building was also the interchange for the cross-channel boats. Oostende was formerly a very important cross-channel ferry port and in the period 1846-1997 all of the passengers passed through the 1913 building there or through a previous building on the site. When I was here in 2014 there was a great deal of building work being undertaken hereon the beach. And now, they seem to have finished it. They have erected a huge new sea wall here as you can see on the left of the photo. There was a walkway along it and so I reckoned that I would go for a walk down to the end. I first came to Oostende in the mid-1970s and anyone who hasn’t been here since those days won’t recognise it at all. It’s changed quite considerably since the 1980s when I spent several happy weeks here with Nerina and again when I was driving coaches for Shearings. Almost all of the places that I knew have been swept away. However ferries no longer leave here for the UK since Transmanche Ferries went into liquidation in 2013 and the port installations are slowly declining. There’s just the odd cruise ship that calls here now – we saw one of those in 2014<\/a> – and there’s the odd ship laid up in there every now and again. Fishing is quite an important part of the way of life of Oostende and a great deal of fish are landed here. I talked about the fishmarket here when we went for a walk around the town on Saturday. It’s one of the major attractions of the town. There’s a monument there – a huge one of a sailor looking out to sea and is a memorial to all of those who set out to sea and never came back. As for what are hidden by the orange covers, I really have no idea. I imagine that I’ll have to come back in the summer for a better look. The new sea wall, upon which i’m standing, will shelter this beach, hopefully from the wind and definitely from the rough waves, and this will encourage more tourists to visit here.<\/p>\n By the way, the entrance to the port is just there to the left, with the harbour entrance light on the end. The entrance looks rather narrow to me and I suppose that it’s a good job that ferries and large ships no longer sail into the port. It doesn’t make for comfortable manoeuvring<\/a>Americans like to brag that they invented the shopping mall – undercover shopping galleries – but that’s far from the truth. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>I walked all the way down the pedestrian street to the docks to see what was happening down here. But never mind that for a moment – have you noticed the sky? We have a pile of blue sky there and not a cloud in the sky.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>Crossing over the road, I took a photo of the docks looking the other way. The sea is down there.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>Having been to the Delhaize to buy a baguette<\/em> and some grapes, I went for a walk along the promenade again. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>From halfway down the walkway on top of the new sea wall, there was a really good view of the sea front.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>The port of Oostende had declined considerably over the last 20 years. The port down there used to be heaving with ships and there was always something going on.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>This is really all that you can hope to see today unless you are very lucky. It looks as if it’s a fishing boat, heading out of the port on its way to the North Sea.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>Here’s another shot of the sea front here at Oostende. Again, it’s all totally different from 20 years ago. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>But you can see what Oostende is so popular with holidaymakers and tourists. The beaches really are magnificent.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/a>Here’s the new harbour entrance, with the new sea wall just here where I’m standing and on the other side of the entrance is a nice, new harbour entrance light that looks as if it’s made of concrete. <\/p>\n
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