One of the most original wedding presents we received was from one of Rasmus’ colleagues and his wife. They gifted us a night in a hotel in the east of Belgium, a hotel that they had been to a few months before when grandparents had taken their cute french-speaking son off their hands and they had escaped for the night, a hotel that they had been in raptures about the next time we went round.
I am so not kidding about the raptures.
Carbon Hotel is a very modern designer hotel in Genk (not to be confused with Ghent), which is in eastern Belgium and which if I am completely honest I had not heard of before the gift voucher arrived. And I can’t really tell you much about it either since we spent no time outside of the hotel…
We left on Friday after leaving work early and thanked God every 100m of traffic that we do not have to commute to work through that chaos.
And then we arrived and walked up to our room on the second floor and in to this:
Wow. This is the kind of hotel I stay in in my dreams. You seriously have no idea how much I have daydreamed and longed to sleep in a bedroom that has a bath in it. A BATH! IN THE BEDROOM! I cannot describe its awesomeness.
The room had a gorgeously comfy king size bed – complete with artfully arranged throw blanket – a flat screen tv, ipod dock, dimmer lights, a FREE minibar (FREE!), towelling robes, a photo book on cool furniture.
And did I mention the bath was in the bedroom??
Oh, and the lights behind the bed changed colour. Which I tried to take photos of but you don’t really get the full effect. Maybe some clever photographer person can tell me what I did wrong?
They bought us prosecco when we arrived. And then MORE prosecco and olives and parma ham just half an hour before we had booked dinner. (we drank a lot of prosecco)
And there was a rain shower. It is also my dream to one day have one of these. Only without the shower tray. I will have one of those awesome shower rooms where the floor sloops just ever so slightly, so all the water runs away into the corner. It will come to pass, I am sure.
And everything was dark and classy and incredibly sexy.
For dinner we ate in their award-winning restaurant downstairs (the awards were for the design, but the food was pretty good too) and chose their six course taster menu. And more prosecco of course.
It was such a wonderfully amazing night. I think I finally passed out at 3am. But that was fine because breakfast went on until 11.30 – 11.30! – and check out was not until midday. Which we took full advantage of, you can be sure. I had a bath, of course.
So I can’t really say I recommend Genk as the up and coming destination. But if you ever find yourself here for the night, or you decide to take the train from Brussels for the night, you should make a booking at Carbon.
Also: night in a fancy hotel as a wedding gift? Truly wonderful idea.
