Thursday April 19 Antwerpen

Well we are the lucky recipients of a tag-along on Jerry's business meetings in Antwerp, Belgium.
While he works, we play--not bad,eh?!  We left the house super early because Jerry needed to be at the office by 9am. After a bit of crazy driving down the tiny crooked streets (thanks Tomtom!) we made it to our hotel. We stored our luggage in the closet, made plans to check in at 2 and headed downstairs to use the bathroom before we headed out to explore. Now you guys all know how I like to find a deal/bargain/semi-sneaky way of doing something, right? So next to the bathrooms is the breakfast room, with the free breakfast buffet...so I think to myself, "why not just walk in and grab a coffee?" Nothing ventured nothing gained! So in we trooped and sat down and relaxed. The kids got Belgian pastries which involved chocolate and cream and fruit(at my insistence) and I had my coffee. It was perfect! I got out our city map and we planned our day. Score one!!
The square which the hotel is on also has the Antwerp Central Station, The Diamond museum,the diamond streets heading off of it and the Zoo. We love Zoo's, and with our membership at Blijdorp we get in to this zoo for free! Score Two!
Antwerp Zoo is one of the oldest zoos in the world, established in 1843. Many buildings are very well preserved. The cool lion entrance to the zoo is from 1843.

The original role of the zoo was to encourage zoological and botanical sciences. It also hosted cultural events like symphony concerts in its gardens and in the 1920 Summer Olympics hosted wrestling and boxing! And then there are the animals! The zoo was the first one to have an exhibit of Okapi-one of Danny's favourite zoo animals.

Their enclosure is a Moor temple from 1885! It is gorgeous.And the elephants are in an Egyptian Temple from 1856, though they were outside when we visited. The setting helped you imagine people from the turn of the last century exploring this zoo too. That was cool!



The signs were all in several languages and luckily English was one of them. Danny spent lots of time on the history,breeding and preservation of each and every species. That kid like to learn! The sun peeked in and out and it was quite chilly, but we were at the zoo for about 4 hours! And when we were through we just walked out the gate and across the square to our hotel. Just as we arrived it started to pour, good timing! We checked in and headed to the room to open the cooler and have our picnic. We then walked to the end of the square and visited the historical Central Station. The original station building was constructed between 1895 and 1905 as a replacement for the original terminus of the Brussels-Mechelen-Antwerp Railway. The stone clad terminus buildings, with a vast dome above the waiting room hall were designed by Louis Delacenserie and the vast (185 metres long and 44 metres high) iron and glass train shed by Clement van Bogaet. The viaduct into the station is also a notable structure designed by local architect Jan Van Asperen. We thought it felt like there had to be a Platform 9 3/4 in the station somewhere, though we didn't find it. Charlotte just wanted to run at the walls....! It is massive and gorgeous and voted 4th most beautiful train station in the world.

Be sure to check out one of the first flash mobs, it was staged right at this station. It was Do,Re,Mi from the Sound of Music, and it is on Youtube if you want to see a cool use of this station!
From there we window shopped along the diamond street:row after row of diamond shops with sparkly windows. 6 out of every 10 diamonds in the world come from Antwerp.We found a favourite shop..

From here we met up with Jerry and went to a neat beer pub we had scoped out. The girls were thrilled to sit at the bar and have a Coca-cola light, while Danny and I played connect-4. The place happened to be filled up with a Japanese tour group. A Grandfatherly type wandered over to the kids and though he didn't speak English, he told them he wanted to do magic tricks for them. It was so sweet! He was so excited and proud of himself, and we were cracking up. The tricks were all a coin disappearing and reappearing in his ear or mouth. Priceless. Then he went and got his wife so she could take her picture with us. It was just a hoot!

Here we are all pretending to make coins flip out of our mouths, he posed this one! We also drank a toast to Donnie, a wonderful brother, Uncle and Godfather who has a birthday tomorrow. Wish he was here to join us for a Belgian beer.