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Published: August 30th 2008
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Our whistle-stop tour of Belgium ended with a brief trip to Antwerp-on realising our train to Amsterdam went through the city, we couldn't resist stopping off there to see the location of Rob Lee's famous hat-trick of headers in NUFC's return to European football in 1994 (well, famous to people in Newcastle, anyway!) ;o) Our train was at 7:30am and it was a double-decker, which I found quite exciting! Why don't we have them in England?! We were slightly delayed, arriving in Antwerp at 8:15am, and so after storing our luggage, it was a rush into the city to see what we could.
First of all though, we were starving, and on spotting a McDonalds on Kaiserlei on the way out of the station, we couldn't resist a trip in for a cheap breakfast. I wasn't impressed to find that croissants have replaced bagels in the European mainland menus, but I did get my pancakes and a proper cup of tea so couldn't complain too much...plus John had fun learning dutch words from the guy who served us AND Leona Lewis was on the radio when we were in there :o) Once we were filled up, we headed further down
to the Meir shopping street, where we were amazed to find a Greggs bakery! Weirdly enough, while wandering around looking for food in Ghent, we had been complaining about the lack of Greggs in Europe...and there one was! It was the only one we saw in the whole two weeks, so we amused ourselves by deciding that someone from Newcastle had gone over there for the UEFA Cup match and deciding that the one thing Antwerp was sorely missing was a Greggs, moved over there and opened one. Surely that's the only explanation, right?! ;o) Anyway, Meir is one of the main shopping streets in the whole of Belgium but it was still insanely quiet at 9am on a Monday morning, which was a bit disconcerting. We also found ourselves feeling a bit sorry for Belgians because while it was a nice street, I wouldn't say it was one of the better shopping districts I'd ever seen! Ghent seemed better to us, to be totally honest.
From Meir, we wandered around a bit getting ourselves totally lost about six billion times before finally stumbling upon the Cathedral of our Lady, which was absolutely stunning...the Meir may have been a
slight disappointment, but that certainly wasn't! We found ourselves wandering around taking the building in for quite a while-it was absolutely huge but didn't lose any of it's beauty in the size, and it was just gorgeous. We then managed to get lost again trying to find the Grote Markt, walking in completely the wrong direction towards Groen-plaats. Taking a rest there to get out the map and try to figure out what the hell we were doing, we found ourselves sitting next to a clearly crazy man who was apparently talking to himself in a very animatd fashion-I preferred to believe he was just talking to someone in a headset that I couldn't see, but then once we'd left and been walking away for about a minute, some really crazy loud screaming came from the direction that we'd just been sitting...so I guess he actually was just insane! Thankfully we managed to find ourselves going the right way and didn't have to turn back to Groen-plaats to find our bearings...and as it turned out, we'd only been about two metres from the Grote Markt at an earlier point before turning back and deciding we were going the wrong way
*rolls eyes* I blame John! There were a few more tourists there than we'd seen in the rest of the city, which comforted us because walking around completely empty streets had started to become a bit eerie! The square was again absolutely beautiful with a really pretty fountain in the centre-again, we had a bit of a rest and just sat around taking everything in.
We didn't have much time left at this point (it really was an insanely quick stop, because we didn't want to lose too much of our time in Amsterdam!) so we decided to take a brief walk to the banks of the River Scheldt, passing by the fabulous Vleeshuis on our way. When we reached the Sheldt, we saw possibly the greatest statue ever: the Lange. It's right outside the Steen (a castle which is the oldest building in Antwerp and not unlike the Gravensteen in Ghent, albeit not as impressive) and is basically a really large, funny looking man with two little men staring up at him. I found the statue awesome enough on it's own, but since getting back, I've found out that until the seventeenth century, the large man also had
an incredibly large penis...classic. With that and the Mannequin Pis in Brussels, what is with Belgians and their incredibly random statues?! Anyway, the penis was removed because it was deemed too offensive-something I deem to be completely ridiculous personally, because I think that sight would have had me laughing for the rest of the holiday!
And with that, it was time to return to the train station and say goodbye to Belgium. Antwerp is a nice city and I would have appreciated having a bit more time to spend there because (screaming guys aside) it had a friendly atmosphere and some very beautiful buildings...and Belgium as a whole was a fantastic country, full of history and great people. We actually found ourselves sad about having to leave for quite a few days afterward!
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