After hopping around multiple countries for a week, we were ready to slow our pace for a few days and spend time with our favorite Lil Fraz! On one of our trains from Germany back to Belgium, I was sitting & reading my Kindle when the stewardess serving hot coffee behind me lost her footing and the entire scalding cup poured down my back!! I was so shocked & surprised that I couldn't even say anything! Everyone around me immediately reached out with various creams & ointment tubes (all of which I couldn't read/understand) and the stewardess felt so bad! Thankfully it cooled off quickly & I was wearing a black turtleneck so you couldn't even see the coffee. We arrived at the train station in Antwerp soon after and were all ready for a big round of hugs with Emily!
The first three things we noticed about Antwerp:
+ It’s magnificent train station (it literally goes 4 levels under ground AND is on the list of the most beautiful train stations in Europe!)
+ the almost obscene amount of jewelry stores (Antwerp is known as the diamond capital of the world with 84% of the world’s uncut diamonds & 50% of the worlds cut diamonds)
+ the large population of Hasidic Jews (has anyone watched Unorthodox?)
I found a boutique hostel a mile and a half from the city center to be our home base & it was well worth the farther treck from all the site seeing. Brian headed off on his own most of the time for some introvert exploration while Emily showed us girls around her favorite spots in the city. We walked through Grote Market & past the 16th century Town Hall, along the waterfront to see where Emily’s ship sailed, through Cathedral of our Lady & Sint-Pauluskerk (love the use of black and white in Belgian cathedrals!), through Stadsfeestzaal (oldest shopping mall in Antwerp) & Meir, and through hidden alleys. We ate lots of Belgian waffles & frites, popped in book stores and sat in cafes. I honestly took the fewest images in Antwerp but our time there was just what we needed to wrap up our trip! Matt & Kaelyn even stopped through for a little day tour while her parents were in town and we got to do a mini shoot in the Central Train Station!
Thanks to COVID numbers spiking around the world, there was a major labor shortage at the Brussels airport & it took us 3.5 hours to get from check in to our gate. We were sure we had long missed our flight by the time we got through the final checkpoint but they held it for 45 minutes because every other flight to London had been cancelled for the day (shortage of pilots & airline staff) and everyone on our flight was in the same position we were in- stuck in long lines for check in, security & customs due to staff shortage. Whew! We were counting our blessings that we didn’t have any cancelled or missed flights coming back to the U.S. because we could hear them cancelling them all around us.
This wraps up our Europe 2021 coverage!! I hope you enjoyed it!
If you missed any of the past posts, you can find them here:
BRUSSELS | PARIS | STRAUSBURG | COLMAR | BASEL | ZURICH | STUTTGART/HEIDELBERG
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