Day 5
After breakfast Sabine took us on her last walking tour of
Dordrecht - - she would be leaving us in Antwerp, and her Belgian counterpart,
Roger would be taking over. We went past
many of the same areas Tom had taken us to the night before, but without as
many funny stories. We also went past
the big church I mentioned before, but did not go inside. Our bus picked us up near the church and we
drove to Antwerp.
Antwerp is the second most populous city in Belgium (after
Brussels), but has the most extensive geography. Practically the entire Scheldt river to the North Sea
has been turned into port facilities.
The city is also well known for the diamond trade. It grew in economic importance in the 1500s
after the Zwin inlet to Bruges
silted up. I don’t think Belgium in
general had the as much economic turmoil at the Netherlands, since they were
always part of the Spanish, French or Austrian polities until the late 19th
century. Antwerp was pretty rich for a
while though, as can be seen by its renaissance architecture.
We get off the bus right by the tourist center, complete with a large Ferris wheel.
Roger marches
us a few blocks in from the river to the Antwerp cathedral, which has a really
large spire. It was supposed to have
two, but money and changing construction plans changed. We admired several Peter
Paul Rubens paintings inside the church.
Afterwards we walked through some streets with a lot of very
high end boutiques for lunch. The streets are wider than the ones in the
Netherlands cities we visited, and less crowded with the ever dangerous
cyclists (although they are still in relative abundance compared to anywhere in
the US)
After lunch we went to the Museum Mayer van den Berg. This is an eclectic collection of gothic and renaissance art started by the eponymous founder around 1900. He came from a wealthy family, and after a few years of working the family business, he decided he wanted to be an art collector, and pushed all of his business responsibilities onto his younger brother. He visited many art dealers (1000s) throughout Europe, and kept rigorous notes of what they had and what he wanted. Sadly, he died fairly young (43), and his mother designed a mansion next to her home in Antwerp to house the collection of over 1000 pieces. She stipulated that no part of the collection could be sold, nor could the collection be added to. Indeed, using van den Berg’s notes, the national trust in Belgium has been able to track down art works he would have wanted to collect if he had been alive. The trust has purchased these ‘new’ items, and then given them to the museum on permanent loan. The museum is notable for Breughels, and walls with panels of ‘gilded’ leather wallpaper.
There is some time to walk around old Antwerp for a bit before we take the bus to the barge (about a mile away). We see some women (maybe a wedding party, there are a lot in the city) playing ‘city golf’ where you have a piece of carpet to set your ball on, and you putt towards local landmarks. After we freshen up a bit, the bus returns us to town for dinner.
This evening Cindy and I sit next to four women friends, two from New York, one from LA, and one that spits her time between NY and Greece. The two New Yorkers are both named Carol, and we can’t remember which goes with which last name. One of the Carols is a stylish diminutive blond, and reminds me of Marilyn Baugher, she was married to someone in the Foreign Service who worked in the LBJ administration. She has an advanced degree that involves Persian Manuscripts, but made her living as a designer. The other Carol did international finance with her husband. He was going to join her in London after our trip. All of her three children are physicians or in health care somehow-- one of them is a pediatric neurosurgeon in North Carolina. The woman from LA, Lael Rubin, is originally from Chicago but moved west after college. She started out as an English teacher, but then got a law degree and started working in the LA county prosecutor’s office. She ended up handling a lot of high profile murder cases. Now she is one (of nine) civilian oversight commissioners for the LA county sheriff. Tatiana Milonas is the fourth of this group, also an elegantly dressed woman. Cindy likes her a lot - - she has a very sly sense of humor and an engaging accent.
Day 6
The first thing in the morning is a visit the modern harbor house built by Zaha Hadid, a Pritzker Prize winner. It is a strange modern structure reminiscent of a ship floating atop an old fire station in Antwerp harbor. The new structure is office space, but it is Saturday, so we can’t go inside.
Next is a visit to the Rubenhuis, the residence and studio of Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens is the greatest painter of the Flemish baroque, and his fleshy paintings have inspired adjectives in English. He trained in Italy, and was already a success on his return to the lowlands. He spoke several languages and was sent to a variety of countries as a diplomat/spy. His house has many features of an Italian villa, and the art studio is enormous, the better to fit his gigantic paintings. In his studio he often had assistant painters who specialized in a different aspects of painting. For instance, one may have been an expert at flesh, or another was good at birds or animals. Rubens would probably design the paintings, and then do touch up of the almost competed picture.
The Rubens house also features leather wallpaper and a variety of artwork, including self-portraits of Rubens, van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens (his two most famous contemporaries - -note - - I may have misattributed the paintings below). The garden is quite interesting also.
At this point Cindy and I split up. She stays with the tour group, going to the Red Star Line museum (about the American immigration experience from the Antwerp side), lunch in Antwerp and then a drive to Dendermonde to see Van Dyck paintings. I on the other hand, peeled off with Tom, Mark Ray (from Middlebury Vermont, his wife Sarah is a communications officer there, while he does similar work in a private capacity), and Chad Reuland. We plan to bike the 25 miles to our next dockage in Sint Amands.
Everyone else has a normal lowlands bike, but Tom’s description (needlessly) scared me a bit (I think he was trying to make sure the more geriatric tourists who had not been on a bike for 30 years did not come), so I take an E-bike. The E-bike weighs a lot more than a regular bike, and I don’t have it turned on for the first kilometer or so - - and I can definitely feel it. After I get it turned on, I would say the action is about the same as a regular bike (when it is running on its lowest setting), but it is very useful to increase the assist on the few ‘hills’ we come to (mostly rises for highway overpasses).
We ride south in Antwerp past some industrial and then suburban areas.
I am a bit surprised (as I have been on this entire trip) by the paucity of animal life. There are (mew?) gulls, the occasional heron, and carrion crows and magpies. I have seen one stork, and on this bike trip a pair of (I think) marsh harriers. We ride through Hoboken, and then take a free ferry across the river to a nature reserve on the western shore of the Scheldt. While waiting for the ferry, we see the Magnifique 2, our sister barge boat, wending it's way from Sint Amands to Antwerp. The other side of the river was once farming or residential land, but the government has reclaimed it for wetlands restoration after some major floods, and moved the main dyke further westward. In fact, travelling south through the preserve it’s easy to see current homes who once must have had a good view of the river.
We stop at a ‘farm museum’ called De Schuur that also passes as a bar in Bazel and have some beer and a bathroom break. Afterwards we go past the Wissekerke castle.
We bike through Rupelmonde, birthplace of Mercator (he was kicked out of town and only rehabilitated centuries later), a tide mill (the wheel only turns during tidal flow, so it only operates during part of each day), and an erotic statue of a statuesque black woman.
Back on the bikes, we ride along the dike just east of the river, passing many small towns, and glancing at weddings, garden parties, and village fetes. We fight a southwesterly head wind the last few miles, and Chad is flagging (he did not go on the other two, shorter, bike rides) until we get to Sint Amands.
This is a bucolic little village, and we are treated to a harp and cello concert on the rear deck of the boat that evening. The cellist is named Luc Tooten (why he didn’t become a horn or woodwind player is beyond me), and he leaves the boat handing out a CD of his music to everyone - - we have them to spare if anyone wants one. Most of the boat listens to the music in the interior lounge, but we stay out on the deck in beautiful weather, and are surprised to see numerous hot air balloons drifting far across the northern sky. A BBQ dinner is served on deck and we enjoy a wonderful sunset.
No comments:
Post a Comment