25 September, 2023
Antwerpen was like no other city I’d ever been in. OK, I’d been there before, twice- once to visit Rubens Huis with Micheline and Pierrot while I was on exchange and once to go to a mega disco with some of the other exchange students where we danced all night then devoured a ton of frites from a street vendor and slept in the train station until the first train arrived. Ah youth! So, it had been a while and my memories of the place were fairly isolated to those two incidents.
What most stuck with me from this visit was the spirit of Antwerpen. There is an ease to living a certain way simply because there is infrastructure in place to support it. Bike lanes down the major streets that are packed with parents shuttling around their kids in bucket bikes, people doing their shopping and going to work, tourists enjoying the scenery, and at every age from 15 to 90. There are natural gardens everywhere! Down the sides of streets, corners, rooftops, and windowsills- creating habitat for all of the birds and pollinators throughout the city. Little cafés on street corners where a sleepy person can get a delicious breakfast (toast with butter, cheese, and jam- all housemade! or a croissant, or pain au chocolat) with coffee for not too expensive ($15 for it all) and slowly ease into the day.
I was staying at a sweet little hotel in the Sint Andries neighborhood- the fashion and antique district- Maison Nationale about a 30 minute walk or 15ish minute tram ride from Antwerpen Centraal station. It was a wonderful location and fairly central to many of the places I’d wanted to check out. Cafematic became my morning ritual and I only wish I’d been able to go there every morning of my time in Belgium and indeed still today now that I’ve returned.
The food was perfection. It was exactly what I wanted and made in-house as well. The staff were so friendly and generously accommodated my lack of Dutch speaking skills in favor of English. There is a lovely outside seating area where one can participate in the morning rituals of the day- slowly sip a cappuccino and nibble on some toast with jam, butter, and cheese while scribbling in a notebook. The sounds of life dancing across one’s ears: the jingle of bikes whirring past on their commute, someone walking by in conversation on their phone- switching from Dutch to English with incredible ease, a school class noisily approaching with young teens chattering and laughing in two-by-two lines en route to some scholastic outing, pups on leashes snuffling around the ground during their morning stroll.
I lingered there, soaking it all in, relishing that I was a part of that scene, part of the city’s breath that day- not as an on-looker, but as a participant.
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