I knew nothing about Antwerp, and so had no expectations upon arrival. Perhaps because of this I was pleasantly suprised by our trip and it quickly became one of my favourite cities in Belgium. It was easily walkable and not as overwhelmingly large as some of the other cities we had experienced. The buildings were also very attractive, it had a brilliant museum, good food and nice drinks. What more could one want!?
The strange statue we came across in central square made me curious of its origins. It depicted a soldier about to throw a severed hand with a fountain of water expelling from it to signify blood pumping. A fallen giant lay at his feet, a great waterfall of water graphically depicting the blood streaming from his headless neck. If was rather gruesome,and also rather awesome!
The story of its orgins went something like this: Once, long ago, the river Schneldt was guarded by the giant Antigoon from Antwerp, who extracted a toll from passing merchants using the river to transport their goods- if they didn't pay he cut off their hands and threw them in the river. Fed up with this, a heroic Roman soldier called Brabo fought the giant, cutting off his hand and throwing it in the river, and then cutting off his head for good measure.
The weather wasn't the most wonderful as usual, so we made the best of it and enjoyed a few pubs and other indoor enjoyments. This place was called the Pelgrom, and consisted of series of winding 15th century cellars turned into a pub, lit only by candles and finished with old wooden tables and long benches. The atmosphere was amazing and I would love to go back. The other interesting quirk it had was seemingly no front counter to pay or order at; after a little while a waiter simply appeared, took our order and received payment at our table.
Museums were as usual expensive, so we decided to pick the best sounding one. The Plantin Mortetus museum was our choice: focusing on the life of Christopher Plantin and his son in law Jan Mortetus. The special thing about this museum was it was their actual house of residence in the 16th century (and everything inside is perfectly preserved and original) and it also served as their printing press company.
Their printing press work stations were truly impressive, they had an industrial room full of printing presses (this was in fact the first industrial scale company of printing presses in Europe) reading rooms to check for any mistakes in the printed papers, a shop front room full of notes and receipts of purchases and orders, book orders still wrapped in their original wrappers on the shelves and much more.
Plantin Moretus also holds the two oldest printing presses in Europe, one of which I have photographed here.
The living quarters above were also very interesting to see. This was an entertaining room, which would have been full of guests and parties. This strange instrument featured below is a type of piano, however the keys at the front are for women, and to be played at the same time were the keys to the side, to be played by their daughter. There are only 4 of these left in the world which made it quite remarkable.
My favourite part of exploring this museum was our run-in with one of the security gaurds. As we wandered from room to room, she noticed we didn't have the audio guides like most other people, so gave us an impromtue tour instead! She was a wealth of knowledge and obviously very eager to share it with people which was nice. Her English was pretty decent too and she tried impressively hard. The only hitch was when she was trying to explain a sweet smelling vegetable that was cut up and put in the beds to stop them smelling in medieval times, which she hopefully had called 'vinkel?' And we couldn't work out what she was talking about.
She also solved the longstanding mystery of tiny medieval beds for me - I had always wondered why even kings and queens had rather wide but always rather short beds. It turns out the type of food they ate (think pickled herring) gave then wicked indigestion so to combat this they didn't lie down to sleep in bed, but slept sitting upright against the headboard thus they didn't need the extra legroom we use today! (The moral of the story is pickled herring should never be consumed)
Their private library was beautiful, arranged by size and full of ancient books.
As we wandered out and down the street to scope out some more chocolate shops, we noticed a small bakery with the line out the door. Deciding there must be such a large line for a reason, we decided to take a look. We walked away with a little biscuit hand in representation of Brabo, and a delicious almond cake.
It was so amazing we went back the next day for delicious apple strudel and a cherry pastry. It just shows its worth trusting your instincts especially when it comes to food!
We then went to see the Bacon house that had once been the butchers guild in the 1500s. Contrary to the name it did not in fact sell bacon, and looked more like a converted church. However the architecture itself was the reason for its bacon name, here you can see me revelling in the streaky bacon architecture.
We finished our day with a home cooked dinner of lentils and tomato sauce. As we didn't have bowls yet, we made do with eating out of the empty cans, just to be extra classy.
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