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Published: July 27th 2013
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Last year we made a last minute decision to head to Antwerp for chocolate and waffles as our last stop of our trip, so when we were trying to decide what would be the last stop on this trip we chose to hit up Belgium again!
We were a little surprised when we left the Nord station that we had to walk through a red light district and past a couple of abandoned boarded-up buildings but our hotel in the area was still okay. Even though we were leaving back to Canada in only a couple of days, we still needed to find the Laundromat in this hood to have enough clothes to last us until our flights. After getting a few things washed up we headed on a walking tour that our hotel staff had drawn out for us.
We started off at the Jardin Botanique Kruidtuin which was a really nice garden/park area really close by then down the street to see the Royal Palace and further to the Palace of Justice. The Royal Palace was nice with a big park out front. The Palace of Justice might be good... but it was covered top to bottom
in scaffolding so we couldn’t see anything. It seems like anytime we go to a city at least one attraction (if not always the main one) is under construction/renovation/restoration! We walked in behind the scaffolding around the entrance way and took some photos before heading to the next destination. Going back towards the Royal Palace we turned down a street towards the city center, there was a lot of great buildings, statues, and fountains along the way.
Grand Place square was surrounded by beautiful buildings and is even acclaimed to be the most beautiful square in Europe; we grabbed a couple of ridiculously sweet waffles from a stand nearby and went back to sit down and enjoy the scenery for a little bit. After narrowly escaping diabetes, we walked down the road to see the famous Manneken Pis statue. This is literally a statue of a little boy peeing in a fountain.... and to be honest, it’s not that great but for some reason it’s a huge deal – there are tons of souvenirs of the little statue, we even walked by a chocolate store that had made a giant version of it and placed it in the window.
Next stop, frites! We were still full from our waffles but we couldn’t not have a big bag of delicious frites smothered in curry sauce so we grabbed a bag and started our walk back to the hood as it was getting pretty late out and that area seemed sketchy in the daylight.
The next day we only had a couple of places left that we wanted to visit. We made our first stop at the Cathedrale, we tried to go the day before but it had already closed. This church looks absolutely massive from the outside and had some really nice stained glass on the inside. The rest of the church was pretty similar to all of the others that we have visited before. There was a basement with archeological remains of the old foundations of the church which was interesting too. We wanted to visit the Grand Place again and figured that we best have another bag of frites before it was time to head back to Amsterdam for our last night. We walked around the city center for a little while longer before accepting the reality of our vacation coming to an end then headed back
to our hotel to grab our bags. With one last stop at the famous chocolate store, Leonidas, we boarded our train to Amsterdam.
Another trip over, thanks to everyone for following!
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