A weekend in Ghent & Antwerp, Belgium

Hi there! Happy weekend!! After a busy week, a relaxing weekend is a good idea and I'm sure I'll get to that but for this weekend, there is still more of Belgium to be explored!!

This weekend the weather was absolutely beautiful. Maybe even too beautiful, it was over 30 degrees each day, hot & sunny!! But this weather is not going to last. This week should be around 20-24 degrees and it seems like it's just going to keep dropping from there! So this weekend seemed like a good opportunity to explore Ghent with some friends and then have a solo trip to the second biggest city in Belgium, Antwerp.

Saturday, September 9th

In order to say that I relaxed even a little bit this weekend, this morning, I had a slow morning and even slept in a little! At 9:30 AM, I decided to get out of bed and had some yogurt and granola for breakfast while watching Gossip Girl and sipping on my coffee!! Good news, while Gossip Girl is no longer on Canadian Netflix, it is on Dutch Netflix so I will definitely be rewatching the whole series!! After breakfast, I decided that I needed to get outside so I went for a little walk in the wooded park that's just around the corner from my apartment. The park was really nice with trails and playgrounds (I enjoyed the trails, didn't try out the playgrounds). Then I walked along the canal (how crazy is it that there's a canal like a block away from me?!) and around the parts of Ghent that are North of me. At this point, it was getting pretty hot so I headed back to my apartment to get ready for the next activity: Jazz Fest.

On Tuesday, some of my new friends from Indonesia invited me to go to a Jazz Festival with them this Saturday. I didn't really know what to expect and I'm definitely not like the world's biggest fan of Jazz but I said that I'd love to go to hang out!!

So I walked over to the student residence which is about a 30-minute walk from my house. This is where most of my classmates live, and where I would be too if I didn't have this apartment. But it's pretty far from campus so they have to walk/ride bikes the 30-minutes multiple times a day!! It's a sure way to get over 10,000 steps a day!! I got there and met up with my friends Dani & Raihan and met some of their other friends and we all headed to the Jazz Festival.

We took the bus to another bus to get there and it was very worthwhile just going with them to learn how to use the bus system. It's pretty confusing. But there's an app that is super helpful! Actually, it seems like there's an app for everything here. There's one made by the waste collection company that helps you to sort all of your waste and tells you when to put out your garbage, there's one for just about every train company, one for bike rentals, one for scheduling classes, a few for the bank, it's crazy! I'm just glad I have space on my phone for all of them hehe!

Anyway, I'm glad we had a seasoned bus rider with us and he got us to the Jazz Fest which was about 40 minutes outside of the city centre of Ghent.

The Jazz festival was pretty cool, there was a big stage and lots of picnic tables and chairs to listen to the performers and tents to buy drinks & food. We sat down at a big picnic table and ordered some beers (when in Belgium, right?) and listened to the first performers. Now maybe I just don't know what Jazz really is but in my mind, there are trumpets and saxophones and it's the kind of music they play at fancy restaurants or in mafia movie scenes set in the 60s. But that is not what the Jazz at Jazz Fest was like. Here, the main instruments were the cello and a synth and the vocals weren't real words but kinda sounded like a singer's vocal warm-up. But either way, it was still really good and I quite enjoyed it!! We sat and listened to the rest of the first group's act then hung out for about an hour before the next group's act. The next group was a trio with again, a cello, a piano and a synth. These guys won the Jazz Fest the year before and they were also really good!! Still not mafia movie music but good!!

After this act, we decided to walk back to the city centre and grab some Belgian fast food for dinner. We went to BFC (I guess Kentucky is too far away) and it was alright, I don't think I'd go again but it was worth the try!! After this, we went our separate ways and I headed back to my apartment, getting to see the sun setting on the canal en route!

Sunday, September 10th

I got enough relaxing in yesterday morning that today is allowed to be a big day!! I woke up at 7 AM to get ready, eat breakfast and start walking to the train station by 7:45 AM. I made it and I'm currently writing this on the train to Antwerp so I'll give you my plan and I'll break it down on my train ride back!!

Here's my rough schedule:

8:30-9:30: train into Antwerp

The central station in Antwerp is supposed to be gorgeous so I'm very excited to see that

10:30-12:30: a walking tour of the city, stopping to see all the cool sites and learn some history of the city

1:00-2:30: a walk in the underground canals BELOW Antwerp! I'm pumped for this!!

2:30: probably eat something, I think I'll be hungry by this point.

Around 3:00: head to the De Koninck, the Antwerp City Brewery for a tour (and a tasting). I've decided that I'm going to learn about beer.

Around 5:00: walk along the port of Antwerp

Around 6:00: take the train back to Ghent and write the blog post! Luckily this train runs every 30 minutes so that should be easy!

Around 8:00: get back to my apartment and post the blog!

Talk to you then!!

Alright, I am back on the train after my day in Antwerp! This city was absolutely incredible. There's no other way to describe it other than incredible. From the moment I got off the train, I was in awe. That is mostly due to the fact that the central station is quite literally designed to be heaven. I mean that there were harps and grand pianos playing as soon as I got off the train. I'm not exaggerating. It was angelic. Just look at this train station!! Via Rail really needs to step it up!!

After picking my jaw up off the floor I started my walk towards the city centre and the port. In terms of my schedule above, I pretty much kept everything the same! Except, I had more time between getting off the train and starting the walking tour so I walked along the port and got to look at the water, the ferries and other boats and some cool buildings, including the castle. I decided that there wasn’t a ton to see right on the water so I didn’t go back in the evening.

But for my walk towards the city centre, I passed so many historical, beautiful buildings that are now cool designer stores, lots of churches and statues and even a market. This market was pretty similar to the Friday Market in Ghent with just about any product you could dream of buying at oddly low prices.

I walked down to the water and checked out the castle which is the oldest stone building in the city. I guess there are other older buildings but they were built out of wood and have had to be heavily renovated to the point where they aren't really the original building anymore so I think I'd consider this the oldest building in Antwerp, no separate clause. This was actually the gate into a fortress that was built here in the 14th century but it was all taken down when people no longer felt like they needed a fortress. There's a legend that there's a giant that lives in the castle that pushes drunk people into the river. It seems to me that the people of Antwerp are commonly drunk, and therefore don't have the best balance but they figured they could blame it on a mythical creature rather than admitting the real problem. That actually sounds like a pretty good idea, I might try that!

I also looked at the water of the port of Antwerp, which is the second largest port in Europe! This picture doesn't show it but there is a huge shipping terminal just further along the river. Then I headed into the famous square where the walking tour began!

This square, like the train station, was also absolutely beautiful. There are guild houses along one side, the city hall on another, cute cafes with bright umbrellas and even a statue/fountain in the centre. This statue is actually how Antwerp got its name! Here's your history lesson for the day:

There's a legend that there used to be a giant that lived in Antwerp and stood with the river between his legs. (Different giant than the drunk excuse giant). This giant would tax every ship that would try to enter the port of Antwerp and make them pay a toll. If they refused to pay, the giant would cut off their hand. This obviously had negative consequences, for the merchants but also on the economy. So one day, one brave soldier, Silvius Brabo, fought the giant and won (yay!) and gave him a taste of his own medicine by cutting off his hand and throwing it into the river. So Antwerp is roughly translated into "hand throwing". And hands are seen everywhere in the city, they even make hand-shaped Belgian chocolates.

Ok enough history (for now), the walking tour showed us beautiful buildings like:

Hendrik Conscienceplein, a square with a library & a church.

Handelsbeurs, an old stock exchange and "deal-making" building.

The first skyscraper on mainland Europe, now a KBC Bank undergoing renovations.

And the garden of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Which houses the world's oldest printing presses and the first atlas!

The walking tour was overall amazing and Antwerp has gorgeous architecture and history. I did make a new friend on this tour, well I'd say it was more of a one-way friendship. Her name was Zara and she was from Germany and she's been travelling for the past 2 weeks and just left Paris with a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her arm. She told me her entire life story and she talked more on this tour than the tour guide. She asked me to hang out with her for the rest of the day but luckily I already had plans for my next activity: visiting De Ruien!!

Ok, a little bit more history but Antwerp used to have a ton of canals. Like it used to look like Brugge or Amsterdam but it no longer does. How, you might ask? They covered all of them. Why? Because in the Middle Ages, they used the canals as conveniently located places to empty their chamber pots. So eventually, the canals were G-ROSS. The story goes that Napoleon was so disgusted by the smell in Antwerp that he ordered that all of the canals be covered. He actually let civilians cover the canals and any land created by the covering could be theirs! So in the cool square, I was talking about above, on one side, the cafes own the "sidewalk" part so they are allowed to leave their tables and umbrellas out but on the other side, the cafes just own the stores and are allowed to put out their tables, but only during the day! I thought that was pretty cool! That also led to a ton of different materials used to build the "tunnels"! Over the past hundreds of years, the canals have been cleaned out and more modern sewer systems have been installed. At one point, they installed retractable walls in the tunnels to act kind of as locks to trap water in at high tide and systematically release the water to wash out the nasty-ness.

Now in the tunnels, there are some rats, worms, specific spiders and some cool fungus. Oh and groups of 15 tourists twice a day. This was super cool!!!

After coming back up to the surface, I headed for my next destination, the De Koninck brewery. I stopped for some Belgian fries on the way and I figured out what all the fuss is about Belgian fries. They were really tasty!

De Koninck is the most famous brewery in Antwerp. In fact, it seems like these two things go hand-in-hand. I signed up for their "experience" tour which is a super cool modern museum-type-thing. I'm not really sure how to explain it. They have a route that you follow through a bunch of different rooms learning the history of the brewery (dating back to 1833), how they make their beer, other products they make, the specifics of each different kind of beer they make and the whole bottling process, and of course you get to tasty some. Each room is super unique (and informative!) and I learned a ton. I've never been to a "museum" like this but it was insanely cool!!

After my 28,000 steps, my legs were getting tired, the 30-degree heat was getting to me and the sun was starting to set so I decided it was time to head back to Ghent. But not without admiring the central train station again. I actually booked the second next train just so I could spend more time looking at the insane architecture.

But I got home safe and sound and here's one more picture of the train station.