October 16th: Antwerp

That's right; my first trip outside the Netherlands.

This took place on the Tuesday of my trip to Zeeland and it seemed a shame not to head down to Belgium while I was near the border. Lieselot strongly recommended Antwerp, so I went for it.


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Getting there was a bit of a hassle as we were sandwiched against the sea in a relatively unpopulated region (populated for Canada, not for Holland). It took a combination of buses and trains, and lets just say that the connections did not work so well. In one case, the bus got there two minutes before the train left, and after running my ass off to make the switch I literally saw the train pull away as I started to purchase the ticket for it.

Stupidly, I hadn't really prepared for a trip either. I didn't have my train discount card, my passport, any guide books, or, most importantly, my backpack. Lieselot was kind enough to lend me one, which I'm quite sure is the uncoolest backpack ever made by anybody in the history of the world.

Regardless, I made it. It was funny; as I left the last train station in Holland I was reading my book, and when I looked up I immediately knew I was in a different country, even though there were only sparse houses around.

My first impression of Belgium from a train window was that it had substantially less character than the only European country I'd seen so far.

However, this is what it looks like when you get off the train at Antwerp Central station.

The train station is in a gorgeous old building and it's a massive five storey structure with trains arriving on all levels. The immediate photo below gives a good sense of the vertical size of the place.





The streets were about as lively as you could wish for on a kinda-chilly-but-at-least-the-skies-are-sort-of-clear Tuesday afternoon. Antwerp is a beautiful city.




I stopped a few blocks in to sit and consult my guide and map I picked up from the train station for the pleasantly inexpensive price of 1 Euro.

This was interesting. For those who don't follow Belgian politics (I can't fathom that anyone reading this doesn't, but just to be sure), the country is in a perpetual state of governance turmoil. Half the country is Flemish--Dutch, more or less--and half is French. The power between the two halves swings like a pendulem over time periods, but it's currently Flanders, the Flemish region, that has the advantage in economic and population strength.

Think about it this way; for all the political games played between Quebec and Ottawa, Quebec only has about 1/5 of the population of Canada (a ratio which is decreasing). Imagine if they had half, and you get the idea of the daily life of a Belgian politician.

Currently, no party in the country has a clear majority and they have been unable to agree on enough common ground to be able to work together. Over the summer it was seriously speculated that Belgium might break up into two different countries. This threat seems to have passed, but only for the short term.

Why was this interesting while I was reading my guide book? Well, Antwerp is in Flanders, and Flanders was mentioned throughout the guide book--much more often than the conspicious phrase "federal Belgium". Even in the tourist brochures, an attentive eye will catch hints of the tensions in the country.

But anyway. On with the show.









Antwerp has had an on-and-off history as an "important" city, but it's boom periods have come primarily because of the size of its port--the second largest in Europe. (The first largest? Rotterdam.)



Yeah, yeah, you say. Where's the really impressive stuff? Well, this church will knock your socks off.

It's called the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, or Cathedral Of Our Lady, and its spire, at 123 meters, is the highest one in the "Low Countries" (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemberg). I wondered if it was larger than Dom Tower in Utrecht--it is, by 20 meters.




Construction on the church begain in the 14th century and stopped in the 16th. I say 'stopped' because it was never really completed the way it was planned.








Nearby is the city hall, a very nice building.

In front is a fountain that was built as a tribute to the legend of mystical creatures that created Antwerp. It's a pleasant fountain until you look closely and notice that most of the water streams are coming from severed arteries, such as the detached hand held up high.




Along the waterfront is a castle that's been converted into a museum.



This statue is also referencing the legend of the city, in this case looking suspiciously like a giant urinating on a bunch of a peasants.




Notables and runner-ups:

So that's my first Belgium experience. This blog will slowly start to orbit outside of its Netherlands axis as time goes on.

October 12-17: Zeeland

Holland gives its students a week of fall vacation which started last week, so the family headed down to cabin they own in the southern province of Zeeland. I went with them for the first half of the week.

We left just after supper on Friday. The drive down took about two hours, most of it on the country's expansaive array of expressways. The highways were nice, but I wouldn't want to be on them during rush hour; for eight at night, they were pretty darn full.


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I never get tired of illustrating the size difference between Canada and The Netherlands. The drive there, about 150 km, represents driving across about 40% of the country's length. A similar trip in Canada, say from Neepawa to Winnipeg, covers barely a third of the way across the province.

The first morning Thom, Job and I trekked down to the beach, which is only a ten minute walk from the cabin. (For some reason I don't have any pictures of the cabin itself, which is weird. But it's basically a house.)

Here's Thom on the swings before we left and Job in the yard, scowling for some reason.

In front of the beaches are huge sand dunes. I think these ones are natural, but many are artificial to prevent any flooding.

The only things in Holland bigger than its churches are its beaches.

Later that afternoon we headed down to Zierikzee, which is the regional center on the island we were on. (The province of Zeeland has a few big islands, a lot of which is reclaimed land--but more on that later.)


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Zierikzee was a beautiful, historic town. It was fairly crowded and lively.









Above is a wall that originally surrounded the city. It was sort of a gateway to the area, and below you see one of the towers built at either end of the city that served as the literal gateways. Anyone wanting to enter the city had to pay a toll.





If you look in the distance below, you'll see a large tower with a strange-looking peak on top. It's known as the "unfinished church"; it never got finished for lack of resources. So it stands as a massive relic, and one can only wonder what it would have looked like if had ever been finished, as it was planned to be twice as tall.







This is the church beside that huge tower. It looks more like it a seat of government or something.




On Sunday I went for a huge bike ride. Hans dropped me off in the town of Veere, and then I biked back to the cabin.


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It was a thirty kilometer trip; tiring but worthwhile. The town of Veere is a very little place, only about 1000 people, but a beautiful harbour area.







And, as is constituitionally required* of any Dutch town, it has a church that is MUCH too big for the rest of it.

*not really





Around the edge of the town were big fortress walls, heralding back to a time when towns were constantly in danger of being overrun by rival armies.





Amazingly, the door leading into the walls was open. I'd seen many of these doors but they were always closed and locked. I peered inside, and saw a long, dark, descending corridor.



I very badly wanted to walk inside and explore, but I had a paranoia that the door would close behind me (either by a person or a ghost), and I figured that it would be a pretty bad place to get trapped. I stayed out.

Later on I came to a huge dike with many people on top. The wind doesn't just get used for windmills around here!




Nearby was an even bigger beach than the one by our house.




Below is a huge dam built about 50 years ago. You can see a bunch of gates which are used to control the amount of water let through. A road is built across the top of it.

In the 1950s there was a catastrophic flood in the area that killed over 1800 people. Over the next fifty years a massive waterworks project was launched called the Delta Works, and as a result almost all of the waterways in the area are controlled and hedged by manmade structures.




Sometime I am going to write a post on the water management and dam building projects The Netherlands has undertaken, necessary both for reclaiming land and to protect the large amounts of the country that are below sea level. The Dutch are seen as the world leaders in water management (Dutch teams were the ones who built the manmade island for Hong Kong airport, for example), and the dams built around Holland are seen as engineering marvels.

Below is the castle at Burgh-Haamstede, a town on the way back to the cabin. The castle was behind a fence and locked gate, so I couldn't get too close.

I did something on Tuesday, but it's a mystery to be revealed in my next post. (How's that for suspense?)

On the last day I was out there Hans and I took the kids fishing with an old fishing rod they found in the garage. We fished with live worms, which was a first for me.

At first I was dubious that there were any fish in the lake but then to my surprise I started to see fish jumping out of the water...BIG fish! We never caught anything while I was there, but we did get a pretty good bite.