Antwerp: Was...was this the best spot?

We left Brussels in a sweaty mess, but were told, No, it's okay, you're coming into Antwerp Central.

Antwerp Central Station is considered the most beautiful main train station in Europe. It is pretty spectacular:

Grand Central, in Manhattan is very picturesque, like, better than it needs to be. And Antwerp Central surpasses it.

We dragged all of our stuff to the key retrieval place, which had serious AC, got the key, and then trudged around for the tyram stop. Our AirBnB was in the oldtown, or old district, and the tram only neeeded to make a few stops heading towards the river.

Once we found the stop, and rode it down to our stop, as it wound around in a semicircle to point the way it came, we exited. We had to walk for about a hundred seconds, which isn't very much. Like, around a corner and through the passageway on the left below:

And then into a large public square dominated by this:

We walked around the cathedral, found the tiny street the AirBNB flat's entrance was on, and entered with little fanfare. It was hot and sweaty, and I was last up the narrow stairwell with the big rolly bag and the attached white zippered canvas bag. Once inside, the view became immediate:

Wait, we're next to the cathedral?

Yup, and the attached square.

Below, you can see both our place, the four square windows above the red light on the Rooden Hoed restaurant, and the cathedral on the left:

It was sufficiently epic. Inside, with the lofts for the kids:

The cathedral square was so loud at all times, and it was so hot that we had all four of those windows at all times. We're lucky that our kids are used to noisy downtown sounds, like proper city kids, that they slept mostly through it each night.

As you explore the nearby environs, the tower of the cathedral is an easy beacon to keep you grounded, an easy north star.

Antwerp reminded me of the density of Syracuse with the western Europe feel of Amsterdam. Its not exaclty that dense, but we were in the old zone:

And sometimes we'd go out to enjoy ourselves after the kids went to bed, hence the view of our place at night, the four squares above the red light:

We went to a restaurant around the corner from our rental, and Cass ordered the prix-fix menu #2, mussels and calamari. They brought him a red pot with a huge lid (for the shells), filled with more mussels than I've ever seen anyone be given in a restaurant before:

It turned out to be a kilo of mussels, and Cass ate every single one, besides the three I had. He nearly finished the fried calamari as well. It was good, too. For dessert he ordered the frozen lemon stuffed with sherbet:

Outside the front of the cathedral, embedded in the oavers was a porcelain statue kind of attraction: a young boy sleeping on his dog:

And at night:

It's classic and even made its way into the Lego Blocko-brand cathedral model.

Corrie and I met a pub crawl guide, and there'll be a small post about him later. All in all, our short time in Antwerp was magical. I mean, jeeze:

On the first walk around our little neighborhood, we caught sight of the Het Steen, but waited until the kids were with us before we went to it exploring. The Het Steen is the oldest building still standing in Antwerp:

It was originally part of the river fortress, part of the original wall that enclosed the first serious settlements. It ws built in the 1200s, and survived the destruction of the Spanish in the 1500s.

There were cute little courtyards inside the Steen.

Being inside made it seems like a fairytale castle, and since we missed Bruges and Ghent, this was novel.

The combo of where we stayed and the short time frame made this the most ephemeral of all our visits, and the easiest to recede into dream state. It may also be me favorite stop on this journey. We'll see how it feels as time lurches on and I try to return to Antwerp for the Pub Crawl guid anecdote.

As we approached the train station to leave, the shape of a camel on a building became visible:

The camel is visible below on the center left, with Antwerp Central centered, and a giant Ferris Wheel

And of course we rode the Ferris Wheel, and even took a picture from above of the camel statue:

While we were in the gift shop at the Het Steen, Cass came to me holding two different Lego sets of buildings in Antwerp to build, asking me my opinion of which to get. One was the Het Steen and one was the cathedral. I said the cathedral, obviously. He asked why obviously? It filled the entire window of our place, that's why. You went to sleep with it in view each night. It was our landscape beacon, it was our connection to the city.

And, to add to the magic, the Lego model has the boy and dog public sculpture acknowledged in its own design:

We left for Amsterdam as the heatwave was cresting, but it was a very sweaty, no museum visit kind of trip, and we loved it.

Outrageous Watches

Now I understand that watches are unnecessary, that they are jewelry that has some engineering and practical use as added value, but still: jewelry. That estimates the passage of time.

I've written in the past about watches, and while not exactly a horologist in really strict terms, I am knowledgable and even have an eye on what my next purchase will be. How many years? Who knows, who cares, I won;' be spending a ridiculous amount.

In Brussels at an ice cream shop I found an entire watch magazine. It was entirely in French and looked more like a fashion magazine from the states, where every page was either an advertisement or a shaded advertisement. It was labeled as Gratis, free, but I left it. Later, I found it again and took some pictures, just so I could talk about, or mention in some way, that wealthy people don't live like the rest of us.

On a single double-page spread, there were the following items: This first cost a reasonable 390 € (check out my oval work):

While 390 Euro is a good amount of money, it's reasonable for a nice, working, automatic watch, non-name brand edition.

Check out this next one:

Yeesh. That's a spicy meatball, 4,260 € is a lot, but it's in the realm of expensive watch non-Rolex/Cartier edition. Expensive, sure, and certainly out of my price range, but to me it chalks up to upper-echelon reasonable.

Then, as your eyes scan the page, this sucker comes into view:

Oh, get the fuck outta here. 81,700 € is, like, the price of almost four of my Hondas.

This is a bit ridiculous. Rich folks spending their money on whatevs. There couldn't be---

---Wait...W...T...F?

Okay. So rich people live in a totally different place than the rest of us. 242 THOUSAND euros? Does it stimulate your genitals? 

This leads me into my invite to a TED talk about billionaires. Nooses ready and guillotine blades sharpened?

Brussels: Heatwaves in One of the World's Beauties

Day 1: Arrival

The heat was picking up and the train to Brussels was pretty straightforward. Once we got to the train station, we were to walk down a quick street, a straight shot to the tram line, route 93, that would take us easily to a stop just minutes away from our new hotel, and the first trip to Belgium for Corrie and me.

So, simple walk, easy peasy, just look at the phone. It turned out to be entirely uphill, and steep for being a third of a mile. At the top of the hill was the church, which was easily seen just down from our tram stop:

In the hotel, which we chose because they were great with kids, right away greeted us with swings in the lobby:

Sported very nifty wallpaper:

And upholstery:

And had cool built in bunkbeds.

Of course the kids fought over them, an argument that had to be settled with coinflips.

The first day we arrived, we went exploring to try one of the further afield activities, the Atomium:

I had never heard of this attraction, but it has been a symbol of Brussels since the 1958 World's Fair they hosted. From the top had some nice views:

And aftyer Corrie and Camille went elsewhere, Cass and I followed some of the interior paths and went up and down some of the connector tubes:

And into various other spheres to see attractions. Outside there were sculptures, one reminded me of one at our local MOLAA:

Camille had desperately wanted to find a playground, and from the top of the Atomium we spotted what looked like a climbing structure. Once we were all done, we went to check it out.

It turned out to not be a climbing structure, rather it was the entrance to the Design Museum. Since we bought tickets to the Atomium, we had entrance to the design museum as well, and they had some semblance of cool air inside, so we went and walked around for a while inside.

There was some cool, fancy designed things for kids, like a rocking horse:

Or...rando living quarters:

Or many other types of chairs and other high design items. It was weird, and fun, and we probably wouldn't have visited had we not already bought entrance inadvertantly.

But, our first, sweaty day in Brussels was in the bag, and we planned out how to proceed with the few days we had. 

Day 2: Exploring

This turned out to be the Long Day. Ho boy.

So we started walking after we got off our tram. We were going to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts for Belgium.

Brussels has a bunch of cool city-vistas also, but they're on a different scale than smaller places like Aachen. But, like, check out a city mansion, maybe:

There was a large abbey across from the front entrance to a wealthy merchant that's now a public park and garden:

I took the follwoing picture because it cracked me up at first. I thought it was a sign telling people not to get too close to the grass, like No Sniffing the Grass, and I thought that the silhouette was a little pudgy.  

After I realized that it was a shoe, and a No Trampling the Grass sign, and I told the kids, we all had a good laugh about it.

The lobby, if you want to call it that, of the Royal Museum was a large and rather spectacular spot, with the main collection at the end of the hall.

Right in the lobby was a new sculpture, Hands-Man, as his body and face were made of, er, hands:

Whoa

The scale of some of these works of art is always hard to wrap your head around when looking in books or at your Dauily Art app on your phone (just me?), so here are some folks to compare with:

Here's Jaucque-Louis David's "The Death of Marat," one of a handful of paintings (out of thousands) that i recognized from the museum:

There was an added exhibit, a traveling Magritte exhibition, as he was a Belgian Surrealist (the guy in the bowler with an apple in front of his face is his most famous work).

There were plenty of works I hadn't seen of his, and many that I did know of were not in this exibition. Here's one where he uses the silhouette for artistic purposes:

We walked from the Royal Museum to the main square, where the guild houses were stationed, as well as the royal government house and one of the main churches:

This is the kind of thing you find in Paris and Vienna: enormous cobblestoned paved public squares ringed by huge palaces, cathedrals, and, here, guild-houses.

On the walk from there we headed to the comic-strip museum. Corrie was going to peel off from us and head to the Art Nouveau Museum, an art movement that emphasized organic shapes and realistic materials---wood, metal and the like. But the day got away from us, and Corrie was going to go by herself as we visited the Comic Strip spot. But it would have to wait.

Along the walk was a covered mall of sorts:

And some weird/cool buildings:

But, as it turned out, the Comic Strip museum was housed in a Victor Horta building, an old warehouse that was converted into an early department store, and Victor Horta was the face of Art Nouveau, and his house and studio is what constitutes the museum. Anyway, here was a picture of some details inside:

All other pictures could have been us, weary, drenched with sweat, struggling through the museum. We were suggested to start on the top floor, which was the hottest. "It...is not good to end with the top floor."

Lots of Herge stuff, and I learned how rich the Belgian comic strip and book industry was. We bought an English Tin-Tin book.

It was hot, and water consumption is not on par with what we're used to. So, public water is nonexistent, and even restaurants don't give you free water. The heatwave had fully set in, and each day going out to walk for, eh, an entire day, would see me carrying four big bottles of bathroom-filled water bottles, and everyone sweaty and damp looking.

Day 3: Parks and Art Nouveau

After the ten miles of walking in the staggering heat the day before, we decided to find a park, let the kids play, and work out some laundry issues. 

I followed some directions on my Google Maps for a park, but was confused by th eentrance:

That's not a storefront, it's a path through erstwhile stable houses into a public green space:

That transported you to a different time. It was nice, but maybe for a smaller age group, and soon the kids were done.

Before we hiked to a different park, I wanted to check an intersection I found on my phone. First, had to pass the Roosenboom:

Maison Roosenboom

This is what I saw on my phone, close enough to swing by, and weird enough for me to want to go see:

Here's one of the buildings:

The park we headed to was a little better for the kids.

Afterwards we had lunch, Corrie took off to go do her thing---the Victor Horta Museum/Studio---and eventually the kids joined me to do laundry.

Iconic Horta designed hotel

The next day we left for Antwerp, and while we waited at the train station, I snapped a picture of my sweat condition:

And I'm not sure if that picture will come out, but I was dripping with sweat, like, all the time, and by this time, eating a croissant and drinking a cup of coffee in the train station, my shirt soaked through with sweat, and my arms looked like I got out of a pool.

Gross, but part of the daily routine on this half of the trip.

Brussels Thoughts

Holy hell! Brussels is like Paris. Full stop. Brussels is beautiful, bustling, internationally minded, full of foreigners, especially as the capitol of the EU, and while everything is expensive, it's also very French. The television that we watched the World Cup games on in the hotel's lounge was all in French, even while Belgium is an uneasy truce between the French of Wallonia and the Dutch of Flanders.

Twenty-one years ago, people referred to Prague as the Paris of the east. I didn't get that. If anything, it could be Slavic Paris.

The only cities that felt like they were on the same level with the real Paris would be Vienna---the German Paris---and Brussels, in what felt like an angry Dutch/German/Frenchified Paris. Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen...these are all their own things, while Paris, Vienna, and Brussels are on different planes.