Antwerp

So this weekend we went to Antwerp, which is in the north of Belgium, about a 45 minute trainride from here. It's a bigger city than ghent and bruge, there was a lot to do there. So the saturday started off like usual with my art teacher giving us the tour of the city. This lady is the most boring lady I've ever met. Listening to her for an 8 hour day is nothing short of an endurance excersize. When she talks my mind goes instantly into a daydream. Our professors wife came with us on the trip and she couldnt believe how boring and long winded she was. See its not just us students.

Anyways, after our day with her she let us go around dinner time and we went to check into our hotel. We generally stay in hostels but for this city it ended up being the same price to stay in a two person hotel room with 3 ppl than it was for 3 ppl to stay at a hostel. Also, the hostels were way outside of town so we decided to book the cheapest hotel we could find. After lots of searching we found this 2 star hotel in the downtown area for $75 per night so we booked it. It was a decent hotel, we got a good deal because it was one of those online 'cheap hotels' website. So we go to check in and the lady is like "I'm sorry but we've overbooked tonight". My first thought was 'uh oh, were in trouble' but then the lady continured, "....so we've booked you in our 4 star sister hotel in the center of antwerp, and we'll take you there by taxi."

Needles to say we were excited. Our room turned out to be so nice. I've posted pictures. After we went to look for a place to eat and ended up finding this really great Italian restaurant. I was really craving some good pasta, I haven't had any in so long. I had pasta with a 4 cheese sauce.

The next day we woke up and enjoyed our free buffet breakfast. Usually belgians for breakfast just have some cold cereal, bread, or fruit so breakfast usually isnt too big, but this hotel had scrambled eggs, bacon, croissants, fruit, everything. It was the first real hearty breakfast I'd since being here. Yum.

Then we walk out of the hotel and we walk into a large street market. The markets here are so cool. All of the locals are out buying whatever they need, you can really get anything you want there. After wandering around there for a while we headed to the port part of antwerp (Antwerp isnt on the ocean, but its on a large river that connects to the ocean so its one of the world's largest ports). We were going to go into a maritime musuem but in the guide book it said you could climb aboard ships as part of the museum, and since sometimes we act like little kids, this was the part we were most excited about. I asked the museum to make sure we could climb on the boats and he said no that we had to go down the road a little and there was a free baot we could climb around on. So instead of teh maritime history museum we went to find the boat. We finally found the boat, and it was kind of wierd because anyone could walk on and there were these two hosts, that I think lived on the boat. Anyways we took lots of funny pictures and were generally silly.

After the boat it started to snow and get really cold so we headed back to town, looking for a place to go in and get hot chocolat. The first place we went into we walked in and everyone in there stared at us. We sat down anyways and waited for about 10 minutes, and still no one had served us. We decided it was better to leave. A little later we found a much friendlier place that had (i'm sure) better hot chocolat. We then walked through an old nunnery type place with beautful walls and gardens. After this we were pretty soaked and decided to head back on the train. Overall it was a good trip to Antwerp with a lot of good luck involved.