Diamonds are a girl’s best friends – short trip to Antwerp

Antwerp, which is less than an hour by train from here, welcomed us with sunny weather and a fresh harbour breeze yesterday, so our fight for the last available Stroopwafels was soon forgotten (ok, Katha, just kidding). The beautiful weather was awesome as we are actually used to grey and rainy Brussels at the moment… We had a nice look around in the city and spent our lunchbreak under a shady tree (yeah – shady, a cloudburst haunted us not before afternoon), while some guys were making music and playing/singing an endless version of a melancholic song about “sleeping every night in a large and lonely house in a large and lonely bed” and so on. Rather jamming than performance butbeautiful.

By noon, the city got very “crowdy” (new linguistic creation) and tourists from all around the world congested the streets (until rain chased them away in the later afternoon). So we refuged into the big, bright Cathedral of Our Lady, one of the most famous Gothic cathedrals (the interieur is baroque by the way, for historical reasons), a very big one which holds a rank amongst the world’s 20 biggest cathedrals if I remember correctly.

Japanese tourists have by the way a special inspiration to visit this cathedral: A century-old fairytale, almost forgotten in Antwerp but common in Japanese schoolbooks of the first schoolyears for decades,
is responsible for them loving Antwerp so much. This story’s main showplace is the stones in front of one of the Rubens paintings “The Descent from the Cross” in the Cathedral of Our Lady. So if you see a Japanese drawing out his camera in well-known pose he is just reanimating a childhood memory.

For finishing our nice little journey adequately, we quickly bought two very becoming eighteen carat diamond rings for souvenir and then returned to the train station, leaving back to Brussels.