Anvers-Antwerp-Antwerpen

What to call this city? It usually depends which language you're using, but I've found here that hardly anyone calls it Antwerp even when they're speaking English. So for the title of this blog I've settled on the combination of all three used by Express (the group that organizes exchange activities for us) to advertise the trip, and from now on I will refer to it as Antwerp because I think that's what it's best known as in Canada.


So the city itself. I thought it was a great place, and I could probably live there. It was super clean, near water, and had some neat looking buildings (starting with the train station that strikes you right upon arrival). The shopping was also fantastic. Indeed that's all I'd heard about Antwerp before I went, that it was great for fashion and shopping. I thought that would mean expensive, high end stores, but I found instead that there were tons of vintage stores to be found! I also found a store selling all kinds of natural and organic stuff, from shoes to dresses, and I wanted to buy almost all of it. Everything looked so cool! It was difficult to do, but I did manage to leave Antwerp with only two purchases: a jacket and a scarf. Both of which I'm extremely happy with now that I'm back in Brussels.


Antwerp wasn't entirely a shopping trip, however. We started the day in the Ruben's house museum where some of his paintings were on display. The museum was really about the house though, Ruben's was no starving artist!


We also did a walking tour, which started in the Antwerp's Grand Place (every good Belgian city has one), showed us the Notre Dame Cathedral (which I thought was cool with its one onion dome, see the photo), and took us to the Steen (a castle-like building that was the first building in Antwerp). The tour continued, but at this point a few of us decided we could stop for fries and catch up with the group. Of course the fries took longer than expected and we didn't wind up rejoining the tour. However, by calling friends who were still with the group, we managed to find the next stop of the tour after they had left and were on their way to the next. It was a little contemporary art gallery that was called something to do with a panther and offered free enterance. What's not to love about free art in a quaint little building with a courtyard?

After all the touring was done, we caught up with the group again at a restaurant/pub for hot chocolate and then started browsing vintage (and some non-vintage) shops. The evening flew by as there just continued to be places we wanted to go!

So Antwerp was a really nice place to visit, not over touristy and it just had a nice vibe.