Diamond Princess Hotel Antwerp

... wind dies down, honestly! We have six hours to wait in Heathrow, where we will buy stuff that's either cheaper or more familiar than stuff in Brussels, we will eat something (farewell weight watchers, knew my trousers wouldn't be baggy for long..), probably take the mickey out of English travellers in their football shirts and sit in the lounge and write on the blog.<br><br>Very excited about going to Thailand!!

... Long story short: we were going to spend the day in Antwerp and go to Brussels tomorrow, but I am having a problem with my braces and the only orthodontist appointment I could get was this morning, so we decided to just switch our plans...) We ended up walking over to the town square, which is the first one in Europe. I must admit that I was auite surprised to hear that... I even bought some Belgian lace! I couldn't afford anything much of course, but I got a very ...

... for dinner to a very impressive establishment called Rooden Hoed. They serve very exquisite culinary delights all starting with Foie Gras through Sweetbreads and saddle of Veal chops much ...

... to Antwerpians, it's obvious that their city is the centre of the world." "Always exaggerate, and use the word 'kei' (pronounced like 'care') all the time. It means something like 'very.'" "Always talk very loudly, and have an opinion on everything. In Antwerp, this is considered normal. In the rest of Belgium, it is considered very annoying." "Bad news for the Brits and Danes: Antwerpians never stand in line when waiting for a bus. The strongest ...

... bike, taxi, bus- both standard and bendy ones. I am going by metro. A one day pass for the metro and tram network is four Euros. The metro is sickeningly clean and efficient. There is quite blatantly immense amounts of investment in infrastructure here. Given that I have not seen any obvious brand names on any of the public transport vehicles, I can only see that it is public-funded, as well as government-organized. This is something ...

... Belgian Bar I had really ever been to. The rest were all Irish or American pubs, full of English speaking people. Here it was french all around! Across the street from Delirium is "the Absinthe House". This place sells every type of Absinthe in the world. The pub crawl ended right before this stop as absinthe would be the last thing the majority of us needed at that point. This pub crawl was a true pub crawl that put a good finish onto ...

... see his back again. From what I could get from the Dutch explanation, Magritte was a Surrealist painter, in the sama vain as Salvador Dali. For some reason, his painting just struck me; perhaps because Magritte interupts your expectations when you think that you'll see the man's face. It also reminded me of those dreams where you can see a person but you can't make out their face. The rest of the museum was the typical display of 14th - 19th century religious art: a lot of Madonna's, Jesus ...

... had some collection of some Japanese Artist (famous but I cant remember the name). It wasnt really what I had imagined, I was thinking more of some historical clothe pieces, but it end up having one whole floor for this Jap Artist + a few clothes from the students of the college in the same building. Anyway, the Museum of Fine Art was much better. Plus, it also had this Jan Fabre's exhibition too, so it was a mixture of modern art among the old art. Across the museum was a ...

Two weeks to go before lift off and I haven't decided yet where to go. I think the first idea, to go from good old Belgica to Porto on my bike is the best idea. I think I fancy a nice port wine with view of the old harbor! I might change my mind and go cycling to the north cape instead, but not really... Friday the 2th, I have done my last day at work... Next Tuesday I will take the train to 'De Panne' a seeside town in Belgium next to the border ...

... across the IJ River to an area in the north of A'dam that offers free parking. Melanie is a much more important person to the bank than I am so she gets a free car, but parking is not covered by the bank. It's only about a 10-minute walk/ferry total which is definitely worth it when you think about the roughly EUR30 it costs to park in the center of town for a day. As we loaded up all the bags into the car, I proved to everyone that in fact, it was way too early - I told Chris to ...