Antwerp

With the last of our May long weekends approaching, Dave and I agreed that it would be a shame to spend all four days off just hanging around the apartment. However, lucky for David, the three previous weeks of trips to Germany left me uninterested in travel, so we settled on a day trip.

We set our sites on Brussels, but after mentioning our plans to a few friends, they all recommended we try Bruges or Antwerp instead. We'd been to Bruges last year, and Antwerp was within the day-driving radius, so figured why not. I printed out a few pages of tourism information from wiki travel, we programmed the GPS, and we were ready to go.

And like all road trips, we got going later than intended. We plowed headlong northwest, slipping through the abandoned border patrol, and into the heart of Belgium by early afternoon.

We knew little about Antwerp, other than the fact that it was the home of many Rubens paintings (to be honest, I couldn't remember a single one of his works, but I was impressed nonetheless) and is the diamond capital of the world. So we didn't have any expectations, or checklists of things to see. Some of our best trips have started out this way.

Agenda or not, it might have been a good idea to bring a map. The GPS brought us to the old part of the city, but we were completely disoriented. We parked the car and walked into the old city, passing through quiet, un-touristic streets, past numerous pubs (Antwerp has more pubs per capital than any other city in the world...are you as surprised as we were?), and finally to a line of antiques shops. I dipped in and out of a few and found at least a dozen things that would have been great for us...if only we had a house and a yard.

Finally in the market square - which was strangely reminiscent of the market square in Bruges - we took some photos of the classic Flemish buildings, the nearby cathedral tower, and the unique fountain. We wandered through the quarter, and stopped for a late lunch in an ivy-covered stone pub, which was decorated with scores of religious statues. The weather was fine, but we were so intrigued by the interior that we sat inside to take photos.

After lunch we walked further, rounding out our visit of the quarter. We walked to the river and gazed down both sides of the bank, then decided to see what the diamond district was like. Dave was hoping it looked like the opening scenes of Snatch. Well, like I said, we were rather disoriented, and our wikitravel pages weren't very helpful, and the big public maps didn't exactly have the diamond district outlined on them. So we wandered back and forth for a while before giving up and calling it a day. On the way back to the car I insisted on buying a box of Belgian chocolate, which we relished for days afterward.

The drive back was fine, I didn't fall asleep and the weather was mild enough to not melt the chocolates.

Maybe some other time we'll return and look for the diamonds.