You don't even have to leave the glorious train station to get a hint that 80% of the world's uncut diamonds are traded here.
My next post will be all about Antwerp itself. But before we really started exploring that city, we took side trips to two of Belgium's other gems.
First, Bruges--which I had been repeatedly warned is picture-perfect, but everyone knows it and the tourist hordes are so thick you can barely walk through them. Both these things were true. Even the picture-perfect swans seemed to need a break from having their photo taken.
The streets were clogged with horse-drawn carriages full of visitors and the canals gave boatloads more another way to see the city. We battled our way around on foot for awhile, sharing a Belgian waffle far too early in the day to be able to justify such a thing (but oh, it was good).
And the streets of the town were indeed sigh-worthy.
As were the chocolate shops, as ubiquitous here as Starbucks in NYC. I might have stopped in a couple or a dozen of them and may or may not have purchased and consumed more chocolates than someone who has just scarfed down a Belgian waffle should.
Then we moved on to the less-intense-but-equally-beautiful, larger city of Ghent, which was a little more our pace.
We spent a couple hours just sitting at a café table out in a busy pedestrian area, people-watching and enjoying the atmosphere. (Me eating more chocolate and drinking some too, while SR embarked upon a project of trying as many different Belgian beers as he can during the week we are here.)
Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
And then as we were wandering back toward the train station, we came upon an ambulance and some crisply dressed nuns, and something appeared to be on fire, and it turned out that we'd stumbled up on the filming of a movie scene! It was for a movie called "Emperor," apparently starring Adrian Brody. So we watched that for awhile before calling it a day. A great day.
Oh, the chocolate!
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