From Ghent to Antwerp

Monday August 9th

So it was back on the road for me again after a nice rest under the trees for a couple of days. Alan set the Tom Tom for Antwerp but planned to stop just outside to reset it for the campsite. A lot of lessons had been learnt from the Ghent experience. There was no way they were going to drive me into the centre of a big city again. So they got to the campsite really easily only to find it fully booked at 11am in the morning. They were given printed directions to another one which happened to be the second choice on the list made the night before. So they programmed the Tom Tom to take them to that one, which it did very successfully. This one was campervans and tents only and very cheap and cheerful. The woman at reception was very helpful and gave them a map and told them where to catch the tram into town and what to see.

Patariki Rides a Tram into Antwerp

The trams are modern and mostly multicar. It was a 5 minute walk away and they come along at least every 10 minutes so it was not long to wait. There is a ticket machine to buy a ticket in the street before you get on. This costs 80c less than buying it on the tram, so they missed the first one as they hadn’t mastered the machine in time. The next one came along and took us through the outer part of the city. Suddenly we went down a tunnel and into the underground system. It was hard to know where you were. Mary got up and looked at the tube map on the wall and said they had better get off at the next stop as that would be the first stop the other side of the river. When they got off they recognised where they were as it was right by where they had come to the first campsite that was full. There was a great view back across to town but no bridges. There had to be a tunnel somewhere to get back to other side. Then Alan spied a tunnel sign pointing to a building right in front of them, so they investigated it and sure enough it was the entrance to the tunnel. Two sets of really old wooden escalators took you down two levels and then you could walk or ride your bike to the other side. It had been built in 1930s. It was just over 500 metres long. On the other side you popped up right in the historic centre of the town.

After buying themselves a baguette at a patisserie, they took me on a tourist train ride around Antwerp. This gave them a good idea of the layout of the town and what to look for and visit although the commentary was very hard to hear above the noise of the wheels on the cobblestone streets. Antwerp, like Ghent has narrow cobblestone streets laid out and largely unchanged since medieval times. There are a lot of walking only areas now and dozens of places to eat in the central city.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the cathedral. There was a special art exhibition in the cathedral which was called Reunion. Prior to the French revolution various guilds had altars in the Cathedral at Antwerp. They were all adorned with paintings and sculptures by the best artists of the era, but under French rule many of these pieces disappeared. After 1815 a number were returned to the cathedral but many ended up in the museum. They have temporarily returned them to the cathedral as an exhibition. It was impossible to reconstruct the original placement as many of the altars have disappeared, so they have been displayed against the church pillars. So included here among other guilds were altarpieces of the cabinetmakers, the fishmongers, the tailors, the wine taveners, the smiths and the schoolmasters who got to share one with the soap boilers. This Mary found very amusing. In the notes it said that they jointly commissioned this but the school masters chose to spend more on the painting than soap boilers, and this is obvious from the choice of subjects. The centre panel has Jesus instructing the scribes in the temple and the left panel has St Augustine being baptised by Ambrosius, the patron saint of all schoolmasters. The soap boilers got the right panel of the triptych depicting the oil miracle, when Elijah helped the widow pay her debts by selling numerous pitchers of oil; oil being the basic ingredient of soap.
Ruebens is Antwerp’s own painter and he has some of his most famous works hung in the cathedral. Probably his most famous work is the Descent from the Cross. It is permanently hung in the Cathedral and part of the exhibition as well as it was originally the altarpiece of the Arquebusiers, (the gunners) It was not a visit you could hurry and well worth paying to see.

A quick trip to the information centre to check on things to do tomorrow was followed by a stroll through another part of town. They found a supermarket and bought a few supplies and then negotiated the underground to get back to the camp, cook dinner, and spend some time sitting outside as it was a warm evening.