Antwerp

travel 2 Minutes

It was our second time in Belgium, and so far, Belgium was good to us. When we were there for the first time in 2015, it was summer, and the weather was beautiful. We had a great tour guide, Mik, with whom we went for a three-hour walking tour of Brussels and then went for a one-day trip to Brugge. I remember how Mik was walking very fast, and some of the people in the group complained, but Boris and I were happy that it was the right speed for us. That was before my back problems started, and then for many years, I was thinking about this trip as “how I want things to be” – I wanted to be able to explore a city on foot again and to be able to walk as long as I want. In this respect, I “closed the circle” – we walked a lot, and nothing hurt.

This time, we took a one-day bus trip to Antwerp and Ghent, and It exceeded expectations. First, when I asked Boris whether he wanted to go on a day trip, he said he didn’t mind but expected that we would be on the bus for most of the day with some stops and a little bit of walking, but it ended up being a lot of walking! I was a little bit suspicious when they put both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking groups on one bus, so during the ride, the tour guides switched, and in each of the cities, we went on separate walking tours. It felt like too much of “optimization,” but fortunately, I was wrong.

Our tour guide, Marko, started by commenting on people taking pictures before even knowing what is in front of them, and he reminded us that the most important thing is our experience, not the Instagram posts. There is nothing especially new and groundbreaking in this statement, but somehow this changed my reception mode, and I took way less pictures than I usually do. He told us a lot of interesting facts (some of them didn’t seem true for me, and I searched for more information; some were completely new, and I also searched for more information, overall, a lot of bookmarks are sitting there waiting for more research to be done). Although he was entertaining, he was not one of these joke-telling-tereotypes-promoting tour guides, he knew in-depth what he was talking about.

Antwerp

Antwerp Castle
The Town Hall
The Grote Markt Square
Each pf the buildings was a home of one of the professional guilds, and the figures on top represent the saint partons of these guilds or other guild symbols.
The Brabo fountain
The Virgin Mary sculpture on this and many other buildings in Anwerp reflect the allegiance to the Catholic Church of the building owners
St. Jacob’s Cathhedral
Our Lady Cathedral
Our Lady Cathedral

A gigantic chocolate figuring in a cafe were we had lunch – how I wish I had space in my luggage!
Many of the Medieval buildings are completely rebild inside while keeping the old fascade
One of such buildings in the process of reconstruction (the yellow structures secure the old fascade)
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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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