Saturday--Antwerp

Before going to Antwerp we bought gas and I went to the ATM for some cash. I was glad that the machine did not eat my card. As I said, it has never happened to me, but I do feel vulnerable on a trip and try to withdraw money during the week. It could really mess up you plans to have to wait for the bank to open on Monday.

We also stopped by the grocery so I could get somethings to eat the next day as I drove to France. I also bought gas-- it cost 37 Euros for about 3/4 of a tank.

We took the train into Antwerp, instead of driving. They have an area at the train stop labeled "kiss and ride", where people just drop off someone who is catching the train. All routes into Antwerp must go under the river (I think it is the Schelde--sorry, Monique if I got it wrong), whether car or train. There is a proposition to build a bridge, but there is much opposition as there is a lot of ship traffic and people think it will cause too many traffic jams when the bridge is up.

Antwerp is not as cute as Bruges, but is also not as touristy and feels more liveable. I am not sure where the people who live in Bruges actually live, hopefully away from the packed tourist areas.

As we walked past a statue outside a church one of the figures suddenly started to move!! It was a man dressed and made up to look like the other figures. If he hadn't moved for the benefit of some children walking past I never would have know he wasn't a statue. Later on we also saw a "statue" of Nostradamus standing on a pedestal. Monique knew it wasn't a statue because she knew there wasn't normally anything in that spot. But I had to stare very closely to see his eye twitch. There were also a few other street performers and a small group of Hare Krishnas walking through the streets singing.

There was a church Monique wanted to show me but a wedding reception was in progress. So we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch to wait for the reception to end. I had a wonderful salad with warm goat cheese--yum. At the restaurant was up two flights of a circular staircase.

I have eaten more cheese, bread and butter since I've been here than in the previous six months or a year. One morning I saw a scale in Monique's bathroom and couldn't resist finding out the bad news. Once I went to the internet and converted the kilograms to pounds I found that I had lost two pounds at least. Hmmm............guess what they say about exercise being the key is true. Imagine that! Monique and I estimate that in three days we'd probably walked about 12 miles.

After visiting the church we went to a large open-air market. The food looked fantastic and we got a few free samples. We had a reservation at a Moroccan restaurant at 7. (have you noticed that I have gone from "the toilet tour" to the food tour!) We still had time after the market so we took a tram to a street full of many different architectural styles. The houses were gorgeous, and none of them tiny of course. Some were in the midst of renovation. At the Moroccan restaurant I had a tagine of chicken and apricots. Once again----YUM!

I will say one thing about my poor French pronounciation----it is WAY better than my Flemish pronounciation. I had Monique in tears of laughter at my garbled attempts to pronounce the names of the stops on the train back to her village.