Antwerp

[flea]

mr. flea is spending a week - 8 days, actually! - in Belgium next week, and so I started poking around to see if I could recommend any travel guides online to him, and now of course I am getting very jealous.

He (and a senior colleague whom he describes as a workaholic) are flying into Charles de Gaulle and taking the TGV to Antwerp. Antwerp is in the Flemish part of Belgium, and is (with Rotterdam) one of the two major ports of Europe. Home of Rubens, Antwerp lace, lots of 16th century architecture. Sigh. I miss Europe. I haven't been outside of this country since 2002, and I was used to spending a lot of time traveling. He doesn't think he'll have much time to sightsee (given the workaholic colleague), but based on my experiences of academic conferences in Europe (Liege 1998!), there should be good food and long lunch hours for walking around. And Belgian beer...

mr. flea being an engineer and a scientist and not much of a humanist, historian, or European traveler, was unable to tell me what city he was going to until recently. He said he was going to a conference on (and about) the Scheldt river. (Which is of course where Antwerp is, but didn't exactly ring a bell to me.)

Comments

[gingerk.livejournal.com]

Tell him to drink some Belgian beer for me. Make that a lot of Belgian beer.

So Jealous!

[ellenbs.livejournal.com]

Antwerp has the Museum Plantin-Moretus, one of my favorite museums. It was a family home as well as a publishing house for centuries. In the 16th century, they published Erasmus and books in I can't remember how many languages (you can see the dies for Coptic, Arabic, Syriac, etc. alphabets). (Under Spanish rule, they later printed mainly dull Counter-Reformation stuff.) The house is gorgeous too!

There are Het Dagelijks Broods (same as Pain Quotidien here) everywhere, which are awesome (and fairly cheap). Have him bring back chocolates (if you are a chocolate person).