9-18-19 - Taking Antwerp by storm
/Day 94. Leanne & Kyle joint blog.
Today is Belgium day. Antwerp to be exact.
The plan is for John and me to take a train from The Hague to Antwerp an hour before Kyle arrives to Antwerp on a train from Paris. Kyle has to wake up by 6am to make it work and we just have a leisurely trip to the Hague central train station. Somehow we mistake the time of our train out by 30 minutes and we have exactly 3 minutes to get to a train to Rotterdam where we would that to connect through toAntwerp. Somehow we manage to rebook our tix in the nick of time.
While on the train to Rotterdam, John and I have to figure out how to arrive before Kyle does. The train we decide on is 100 Europe cheaper but will require catching two trains with only 5 minutes to orient ourselves. We go for it. Somehow, by hook or by crook, John and I navigate the Breda and Rotterdam train stations efficiently enough not to miss another train that day.
We arrive just minutes before Kyle to an absolutely beautiful train station. Antwerp’s central station was once named second most beautiful in the world by some apparently credible source. So it must be. Upon Kyle’s arrival, we treat ourselves to Belgium waffles in the train station. With a little over 8 hours to spend in Antwerp before getting the train back to Paris, we go “Big Saucing” with John once again at the helm with his Antwerp plan and his Google maps.
Ruben is one of Belgium’s most famous painters so he head first to Ruben’s home turned museum. We were expecting to see Ruben’s paintings but it turns out it was mostly paintings he collected of his colleagues works at the time. Upon seeing the bedroom, we see a very short bed, about ½ the length of a normal mattress. Assuming it must have been one of the kids, we are surprised to learn that it was Ruben’s bed and that they slept sitting upright in the short bed because they thought it promoted better digestion. No thanks – I’ll take my California king.
Next we go to St. Charles Borromeo Church which was commissioned by the Jesuits in the early 1600s which the church and the façade decorations and paintings were done by none other than…you guessed it - Rubens. After a quick tour and phots, we make it back to back churches with the Cathedral of our Lady of Antwerp. The difference is that the Cathedral is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We are somewhat surprised as we have seen many gorgeous, immense, splendid Cathedrals and only a select few were UNESCO sites. The Cathedral from the 16thcentury house the statue of Our Lady of Antwerp a statue of Mother and Child that “radiate graciousness and regal dignity.” We’re not sure what that means but it certainly sounds UNSECO worthy.
Next we go for lunch at Frithot Max which is the home of the French Fries museum. John tells us that despite the name, it was actually the Belgians who invented French Fries. Back in the 1650’s, the Belgian people living along the shores the Meuse lake would catch and fry little fish. During a harsh winter, with the river frozen over, they came up with the idea of replacing them with small potato strips that when fried looked similar to the fish they were used to. The French fries is said to have developed during the First World War when French was the official language of the Belgian army. The Belgian army offered fries to their American counterparts and since they spoke French, the Americans assumed the soldiers were French. Armed with this knowledge, you can now impress your friends the next time French fries are served. We have their French fries and maybe it’s psychological but we agree they are the best damn French fries we’ve ever eaten.
On to the Plantin-Moreus House-Workshops-Museum Complex. The complex is a printing plant and publishing house dating from the 16-18thcenturies. The Plantin name refers to the first industrial printer – publisher and houses the two oldest printing presses in the world and a significant collection of rare books. Plantin achieved international fame with a four year project printing the multilingual Bibllia Regia was a new edition of the bible text in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Old Syriac and Aramaic languages. It was the biggest typographic endeavor of his time. It was pretty thought provoking thinking about how the printing press accelerated the spread of information and religion. In 2000, the invention of the printing press was ranked the #1 most impactful event of the 20thcentury. All that we also check off our 2ndUNESCO site of the day.
It’s more than we could have hoped for, it is almost unbelievable, we’ve achieved the UNESCO hat trick with three UNSECO sites in under 6 hours in Antwerp! The final site is the Staduis or Antwerp City Hall. The inside is under renovation but ensure we make snap more than enough pictures.
We squeeze in another (albeit not a UNESCO) site called the MAS which is a modern architectural building housing a museum. We don’t have time for the museum, but you can take 12 sets of long escalators to the top and observe the city from the top of the building. It is the highest observation point in Antwerp. The signs on the roof point out different points in the city and their significance in WW II.
As we wander through the city, we have been quite amused some of the signs on chalkboard stands outside the shops and restaurants such as “Most of the stuff you are worrying about…WON’T HAPPEN!”, “Logic doesn’t produce Magic”, “Save water…drink beer”, “Don’t be eye candy…be soul food.” We also note that Belgium’s oldest pub is from 450 AD while Belgium’s oldest Irish pub is more than 1,500 years later in 1989.
We stop at the Belgium Chocolate store and buy some chocolate for which they are famous. We end the day at an outdoor café where we sample the chocolate and try the local Belgium beer while we write out postcards (we sent postcards from every city we go to our moms, my two nieces with health challenges and our dear friend battling cancer). We have covered the Belgium specialties with waffles, fries, chocolate and beer.
We head back to Paris fulfilled we carpe diem’d the heck out of today!
