An Englishman in Belgium
I’m in Antwerp, which apparently means “Throw Hand” in Dutch and I was shown a very nice statue/fountain outside the Town hall of Antwerp which has a chap (I believe) on top, that is throwing a Giants Hand into the river.
At the time of writing this message I’m sitting in my very nice room in the Plaza Hotel which is centrally situated, a rather nice hotel, the staff are wonderfully helpful and really try hard to speak English to the silly tourists and business travellers like myself.
This evening a colleague from work took me out and on a very short tour of Antwerp. We drove through the city where I was shown many sights and buildings. Antwerp is a very pleasant city, it feels very European (that is a very British thing I think so no one else might get the mental image).
We went for a drink at a Bar/restaurant on the river front where we sat out in the open air sipping an incredibly strong Belgian beer the name of which now escapes me, it began with ‘D’ I believe.
This Desk is far too high to type on …. Hang on while I move the laptop to my lap where it clearly belongs…
Ahhh much better. Now I can feel my fingers again and the edge of the desk isn’t cutting off my circulation.
Anyway, on with the Antwerp evening one description. Jan and I had a beer as said then we strolled through the city up towards the Cathedral which has a very intricate and impressive spire which surpasses most of the Cathedrals in the UK in my opinion. It should have had two very intricate spires, but apparently they ran out of money and were left with one beautiful spire and one which would not look out of place on a 1980’s catholic church in the north of England.
A little deeper into the city from the river we walked past the old Victorian sewers which is (apparently) a tourist attraction, Jan tells me you get waders and walk under the city through the sewer network, unfortunately it’s closed for a few weeks, otherwise I’d have been down like a shot, nothing like a bit of chest high rubber and the smell of raw sewage to get a guy going.
Alas the sewer pipe dream had to come to an end (sorry for the pun, I could not resist), we carried on up further into the city and up to the Town hall which has so many flags of the world attached to it that it could well be the United Nations building in New York!
(this chair isn’t very comfortable either, time to move to the bed)
((Christ, how soft is the bed? I nearly just got eaten by a mattress!!))
So, where was I, ah yes, the Town hall. As I mentioned earlier outside the town hall there is a fantastic Statue of the Roman whom cut off the hand of a Giant who used to live in the castle (did I mention there’s a Bond Villain castle here?) that would make all the sailors pay taxes to bring their ships into Port. Kind of a mythical VAT I suppose, if only they knew about VAT back in Roman times.
Just outside of the town hall we went to a restaurant which looked incredibly pleasant, it is probably worth noting that I don’t speak any Flemish or Dutch at this point (which I plan to change over the following days). Jan reliably informed me that portions of the Menu were in English – ‘Great!’ I though as I turned to the Page Jan had pointed out. The English consisted of the following words: -
· Eels
· Meat
· Fish
· Crunchy Vegetables
Lovely, I’ll have the “Eel meat with fish and Crunchy vegetables” then ;-) In the end I settled for a Beef stew in a very rich onion gravy which was exquisite. I thoroughly enjoyed the meal.
Once I’d finished eating I needed to visit the men’s room, so I got up and wandered towards the back of the Restaurant towards my waiter who had his back to me. Without me even saying a word the Waiter just said in his best English accent “The gents is downstairs sir, on the left.” – that is what I call service!
Alas the evening had to come to an end (work in the morning don’t you know!), Jan very kindly drove me back to the hotel. I’m sitting in my room right now (well lying on the bed) using the WiFi which Windows XP reliably informs me is 11mb and the signal strength is “very low”, although it’s only €20 for the week, so I can’t complain that much, the receptionist suggest if I have issues to just go and sit in the Lobby with my laptop, I’m not sure she’d appreciate me doing so in my dressing gown and fluffy rabbit slippers though.
I have taken some pictures of the room (but not of Antwerp I’m afraid, I forgot my Camera this evening) which I’ll try and upload to my Flickr account.
There’s one really odd thing about the room, it’s very large (the bed is *massive*) but you need to be an amputee to use the toilet… there is literally no leg room, you have to sit on the toilet sideways, very odd...
You can check out more pictures in the Set which I'll keep updated throughout the week called Antwerp May 2006.
Tune in tomorrow for day two of “An Englishman in Belgium”.