Antwerp

Ghent is a 40 minute train ride away from Antwerp, and being that Antwerp is the second biggest city in Belgium, I was hard-pressed with an excuse of why I couldn’t make it up there. So I picked my last day in Ghent (after I exhausted everything to do in Ghent… which isn’t very hard) to make my way up to Antwerp. I jumped on the train with less than 10 seconds to go before the train was to leave the station (Belgium’s trains are very VERY on-time)! The day was sunny and I had a nice ride looking at Belgium’s very green countryside. I was awed by Antwerp’s Centraal train station. I read that many movies chose this station to film any train station scenes and I can understand why. It has all the glamour and elegance of a 1900s train station.



The tourism office in the train station is happy to give out free maps, although it’s kinda hard to get lost because there’s one huge, main street that runs all through Antwerp.
Meir is the main pedestrian shopping street, and I was pretty blown away by the sheer size of the street. I could imagine if I were into shopping (flash back 10 years), I wouldn’t want to leave here! ^.^ There are so many malls on Meir, but you gotta keep your eyes open because they don’t advertise the fact that they are malls. In fact, from the street, all of them look pretty dinky, but I was keyed in from how many people were going in and out. And once you go in…

My god this is the prettiest mall I’ve ever been into! There are a lot of stores but yet they’ve managed to make it look spacious and elegant.
I saw people going into another building, which I later read was a palace turned into a café, banquet area for rent and The Chocolate Line is here too:


His original store is in Bruges (see Bruges entry) but I guess he’s going for global chocolate domination muahaha! ^.^ He has an open kitchen in the back so you can see his employees work:

His tempering machine (sooo jealous!):

I stayed a bit to watch the action, and was watching the employee fill the molds with chocolate, one at a time. He put the molds on a vibrator to get all the bubbles out, and then invert the molds to get the excess chocolate out, tap against the temper machine, scrape off excess, put on a wire vibrator and voila, your outer shell is complete, ready for the filling!

Antwerp’s St. Cathedral:

Brabos Fountain, where Antwerp got its name from the statue of the hand. Handtwerpen got shorten to Antwerpen.


I thought this was a castle by the river, but it’s actually Antwerp’s Maritime Museum. It was closed, but still very pretty.

The botanical gardens:

The weekend market is also a really BIG affair.

I was heading back to the train station when I saw a lot of people walking toward this direction. It’s a giant plaza in back of a theater. Lots of stalls were Moroccan or Tunisian and I saw one stall with at least 20 people in line for their rolls:

It looks like our Chinese onion flatbread with some Mozzarella-looking cheese and loads of olives and roasted peppers stuffed in. It did look really tempting, but I just didn’t want to be jostled in that huge line!
The area around the Antwerp Centraal train station is known as the Diamond District, for all the diamond businesses based there. I haven’t seen many Asian people in Bruges or Ghent, but damn, there were so many Chinese people in the Diamond District with their LVs and Guccis! There is a Diamond Museum if you’re willing to fork over the 6 euros for that. There’s the Antwerp Zoo next to it, which looked really cool but was a hefty 14-something euro admission fee.

Coming back to Ghent, I went by the plaza where they were setting up the large screen yesterday for the World Cup. Now it looks like:


Complete with a bar!