Welkom bij Antwerpen!

Two evenings before I flew out to Paris, I was in Bethesda with a friend to watch a movie, and as we were crossing the street, I ran into my high school art teacher. This is especially bizarre because I had just been thinking about getting in touch with her, and suddenly my wish was granted in the middle of the street on a Friday night. Thus it was totally by chance that we arranged a rendez-vous for the following day, a summer lunch in the beautiful salon she has in her house as a showcase for her students' work.

In the course of our conversation about all and sundry, Antwerp came up as one of the places to go for cutting-edge design. Embarrassingly given my passion for art, I had no clue about this. Embarrassingly given my status as a denizen of the world, I had no clue at the time whether Antwerp was in Belgium or the Netherlands (I should probably not publicize my ignorance, but what else is the internet for? I mean really). I filed away the information in the back of my brain along with a monumental list of galleries to visit, unsure whether I would have enough time to see everything in Paris, let alone anywhere else.

But then I got to talking to my friend Sara, a graduate of the same high school art class who's off drawing funny pictures of Dutch clogs being an artistic genius in Utrecht, and we realized that Antwerp happens to sit right between us on the map. (And in Belgium, for the record.) So we booked our tickets and up and went in the middle of October. Thus it was that one of the best weekends I've spent abroad came about by sheer chance, thanks to wanting to see Crazy Stupid Love on a humid summer night in Maryland.

This is what Anterpen Centraal looks like after a few Belgian beers.
[Thanks, Wikipedia! You're a pal.]

I arrive a few hours earlier than Sara into the city, known amongst tourists as "that place between Paris and Amsterdam" and to those of us who have read its Wikipedia page as Belgium's fashion playground. It's actually pretty cool: this is the place that, in the eighties, gave birth to the Antwerp Six, a group of fashion designers from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts who packed themselves and their collections into a rented truck, drove to London Fashion Week, putting Belgium squarely on the map. But let's not get carried away. This is also the place that sells bread in vending machines.

I wander down through the diamond district (another surprising source of fame) into the southeast corner of the city, which boasts a bizarre collection of architecture and two squares line corner to corner with bars. Of course, eleven in the morning is a little early to start drinking, even in Belgium, so I pass the time until the appropriate hour  wandering around with my head craned back to look at buildings casually adorned with windows like these:

Lente (spring), one of the four houses at an intersection known as the Four Seasons.

The mosaic crowning a particularly loud specimen that was particularly proud to be on Waterloo Straat.

I can imagine breakfast on this balcony only oh too easily.

Why do I not find myself behind the wheel of this large automobile? Why do I not find myself in this beautiful house? And where is my beautiful wife?! Right, no, not bitter at all within an hour of arriving...

Two hours later, the bartender pours me another shot (of coffee) while I sob about the misfortunes of not living in a house with a karyatid-supported balcony and stained glass windows. To console me, Thomas tells me that a few years back there was a plague of rabbits in the nearby city park, way more bunnies than the city's bunny quota could handle. He said that rabbit was the cheapest thing on the menu for weeks.

As it turns out, Saturday night I would be ordering the very same thing off a Belgian menu myself. Despite the fact that not an hour ago I had spent a good ten minutes taking pictures of the herd of bunnies, ducks, and geese living in harmony in the Stadtpark. Sorry, bunnies of my youth.

Pairs well with red wine and ducks.

Then Sara arrives, and the conversation takes a less violent turn. Over the next few hours we polish off another round of caffeine, get lost down a street that would turn out to be where our hosts lived, and catch up on all of the things we'd missed out on for the past ten months of each others' lives. The best way to do this, obviously, is to hit up a Moroccan seafood restaurant and chat over the sounds of the cook frying up our selection of glistening fish.

I feel this picture adequately reflects our varying philosophies on both food and travel: rampant silliness and droll bemusement. You think I kid? On this vacation, I bought a fur-trimmed cape. Sara bought a sweater.

Then it's back to the train station to pick up our bags and meet our lovely Couchsurfing hosts for the weekend, D. and S., who quickly introduce us to Belgian hospitality and Belgian beer. But this weekend? Will turn out not to be an intro course on beer. It's at least a 300-level, and this is the textbook:

Next up on the menu: beer, wild boar, beer, deer, rabbit, beer.