Bikes in Belgium

I discovered a photo I snapped of a magazine page at the library about Pashley bicycles. I keep toying with the idea, but no, I already own two bikes I rarely ride and Pashley's are expensive.  I think I might ride more often if I had a step-through (with a cute basket!), but it's not a gamble I'm going to take in the near future.  (But they are pretty.)

In any case, it reminded me that I never showed you photos of all the amazing bikes we saw in Belgium.  In fact, there are a number of things I didn't show you from that trip, which I will do in future.  Travel agents around here advertise 'City Breaks' or 'Short Breaks' which just weekend trips.  Just think of these long-after-the-trip posts as one of those.

Belgium is flat like Holland so cycling is relatively easy, particularly as bicycles have right of way in most places. 

People apparently commute quite a bit by bike and by train. 

Love her hair and her outfit!

There are a lot of cycles to be seen at some British train stations, but neither Bill nor I had ever seen this phenomenal number of parked bicycles in one place.  You see them at station after station in Belgium.





Also, everyone rides, not just youngsters or young men. 

Business men, older women, stylish women in high heels, entire families.  I could have shown you an amazing young woman riding down the street wearing a purple mini-skirt and tall platform heels with bright orange tights on her long legs, but 'someone' elbowed me to point her out just as I was snapping her photo.




The bikes themselves can be quite unusual, with bits welded on or trailing behind in really amazing ways. 



We found an interesting collection just outside of a primary school.

One could haul all sorts in that wheel barrow shaped thing in the front:




This seemed pretty straight-forward, just lift up the wheel of the child's bike, weld it to your bike and away you pedal!

I'm not clear who sits where on this one!

Some of the bikes were motorised, it has to be admitted.   

I guess this young man didn't want to get his smart leather jacket sweaty.



And Bill couldn't help but admire this unusual bike as well. Or is it a trike?

We took stock one evening sitting outside at a pavement cafe at rush hour one evening:  we only saw one or two people who could remotely be considered overweight.   Then again, the cyclists are probably not a representative sample, just the fittest end of the spectrum.   Cycling, along with cafe pavements and wearing scarves! seems to be a major characteristic of the European city life.

Bored with Belgium...or Is It Blogging?

On one hand, spending hours sifting through photos and putting together posts is a way of getting more value out of our travels.  I rarely tire of looking at photos of beautiful things.  On the other, photo-rich posts are time consuming and require concentration, which strangely for me involves a fair amount of energy, due to frustration, perhaps.  I have several other ideas for such posts, but I think I will leave them for later and get back to blogging about 'real life'.   Or perhaps, I just need to get back to living my real life.

Blogging hasn't been quite the pleasure for me lately that it was before.  This is in part because of the time of year and all the busyness associated with it.  When I'm blogging, I feel I should be doing something else and vice versa.   Also, though I am aware that there are faithful readers, comments have been few and far between of late.  I expect everyone else is also busy and this has never much bothered me because I could look at my stats for encouragement. 

However, some new gimmick has arisen in the blog world and programmes written to hit on blogs for the sole purpose of appearing as sources listed in their blog stats, which then causes bloggers to visit the programmer's website and thus bring traffic to their sites.  I'm guessing this might then generate potential income from advertising or whatever.  If this is happening to your blog - do not visit their website!  Google may or may not find a way to block these hits but I doubt they will manage to restore people's stats and so this has removed one of the external rewards I had for blogging.

I don't expect I will stop blogging, as I do enjoy it so much.  I may just scale back.  I haven't decided yet.  For now, I will show you Gravensteen.  The name means 'castle of the count'.  It has been there in Ghent since the 11th century, but rebuilt to an extent that it is probably no longer very authentic. 

Bill and I were perplexed by the spiral stairs. They were backwards, giving the advantage to right-handed, sword-wielding attackers ascending the stairs.   They should spiral in the other direction in order help defend the castle. 

The views from the roof were good, though.

I did have an awakening moment on this visit.  When Bill went to pay our entrance fee, he asked for two seniors tickets.  I found it strange that he would cheat, this not being like him at all, but I tried not to give him away.  Then I looked up at the information board and made a shocking discovery, whereupon I had to say, "OMG, I really am a senior!"  I've not encountered another place where being 55 entitled me to a senior's discount.  Like ticking the last age box on surveys, it's just one of those reminders that time is passing. 




So I need to use it well.

Antwerp Art Nouveau

As usual, I've learned a great deal in the process of writing this post, more than I knew at the time of our visit.

That's always the way I am, though.




For some reason, I cannot get motivated to read about a place before I visit.




I always feel inundated with the information presented in tourist books.




I can't possibly remember it all in advance of what I end up seeing.

However, once I've been, I'm hungry to know more.




I prefer to do things this way, backwards as it is.




It's probably simply laziness on my part.

Bill remarked about how the lines of the car seemed capatible with those of
the house.

Good thing Bill is prepared to do a bit of advance research, although it is very much a case of taking library books along for the ride and then browsing in our spare time during the journey.

This works better on trains than when driving a motorhome, obviously.




Then again, there is a lot of time sitting around in a motorhome.

There are streets and streets of these things!

I remember once that Frugal Scholar remarked she felt she hadn't done Britain properly on her previous visit, hadn't seen nearly all there was to see. 

I've thought long and often about how to 'do' a country - even one as small as Britain -  but I don't actually think it is possible.

Particularly when there is such a density of practically any object of interest, and such a length of history as Britain has.

Perhaps if one limited themself to something quite rare, like pre-historic artifacts, one might get through it all, though Britain did help itself to quite a lot of such things from other countries, and I've always found the British Museum fairly boring.

But never mind Britain, we are 'doing' Belgium, right?  Though Belgium has much the same length of history and is even smaller.

I think Bill did a brilliant job of selecting the focus we would most enjoy - that of tracking down art nouveau architecture.   A round of applause for Bill, please





So here is another tangent for you.  When Bill goes for a run, he prefers a circular route rather than an out-and-back. 

I lean towards that latter approach for several reasons I won't list here.  I always say the return view is different because one is facing a different way. 



Here I have a case in point.  I never realised there were not just two, but four houses at this corner. 



They are called the Four Seasons.  I'd only noticed the two green houses facing us, herfsz (autumn) and zomer.  The two other corners are of course lente (spring) and winter. 

Also, being taken with the funny bay windows and the shape of the roof lines, I missed the frescoes on each building, symbolizing each season. 




Of course this area is not called South Africa by Antwerpians, but rather Zurenborg. 




It is noted not just for the Art Nouveau architecture but for a wide variety of dramatic fin de siecle - turn of the (last) century - styles.





At some point in the notorious 1960s (when loads of historical buildings in Newcastle were demolished), this district was due to be re-developed.

It seems that because the interiors of the buildings were plain and old-fashioned, instead of being decorated throughout like Horta's house in Brussels, they were disdained.

Mind, plain and old-fashioned in the Victorian era will still likely mean high ceilings, wood floors and fireplaces. 

I wanted to photograph them all, better yet, tour them all!

I guess that's all common as muck in Europe but those features are still pretty exciting to me. 




Thankfully some artistic types adopted these buildings and they became listed and most were saved from the wrecking ball.

If not from the cameras of nosy tourists.

Antwerp

Whatever it was I expected Antwerp to be like, it was completely different.  It was last on our list of cities to visit and if we didn't go I wasn't going to be that disappointed.  After all, I was thinking, how different to Brussels, Ghent or Bruges could it be?  So it's sort of a sea port and the tourist book said it had a gay thing going, why would I care?  Just goes to show I don't even know what I don't know.

You can't see it in this photo, but all that metal work is painted red.

I'm used to the gorgeous Victorian cathedrals that are the train stations in the north of England; Newcastle's station is a stunner, but I could still appreciate the beauty of Antwerp's station when we pulled in. 



It reminded me of red lace.

On top of that, though, when you leave the platform area, it reminded me of the incredible sights of Milan train station. 

Other photos show this better than mine, which some how seem small and stark compared with how I remember the place, which is huge.  This gives you an idea of the size.  Sadly, we weren't there then.

When you come out of Newcastle Central Station, you are facing a row of pubs, cafes and hotels. 



Just outside of Bruges station is a lovely little park and a hotel. 

Just outside of Antwerp Central Station is a row of diamond shops. 



Oh yeah...that's what Antwerp is about - the diamond market. 



Which means there is and has been a bit of money there. 

As evidenced by the main street shopping district. It seemed to go on forever.

I have to confess that we were hungry when we arrived and we took the simplest option - McDonald's.  Yeah, I know. 

I have come to really appreciate free toilets, something I've always taken for granted in McDs.  Nope, it cost 40 pence even though we were buying lunch.  [Yes, that subject again.  What do you think, should I call my other blog 'Loos I've Loved' or 'Toilet Talk'?]





The main thing I remember was watching a couple and their small daughter.  The man seemed slightly older than the woman and when I saw them I was thinking they were perhaps Moroccan or Algerian.  The daughter had a happy meal and a balloon, but neither parent had anything to eat.  I wondered if it was because they had other plans or because they couldn't afford it.  In any case they seemed happy enough with their situation.  Then a young girl with a Muslim head scarf came in and went from table to table asking for money; that's the first time I've ever seen an identifiably Muslim female do anything of the like and she certainly didn't look very happy about it.  I was pretty sure we weren't going to give her any money, but whatever she said seemed to get her a 40-50% success rate, including with the man whose daughter was having a happy meal.  That was the other thing that surprised me, that it was the men who came up with change for this girl, not the women.  I was very curious to know what her story was, and what on earth made her chose McDonald's.




The other unusual thing, which we'd not noticed until we were leaving, was that there was a touch screen near the entrance on which one could pre-order a meal before joining the queue, an interesting idea though I'm not sure how it all works. My main thought was that I wouldn't want to touch a screen touched by everyone else just before I ate my food with my hands, particularly as it cost 40 pence to go upstairs and wash them; so, maybe not a great idea, this screen.  Picky of me, I know.

So, we proceeded down the main pedestrian street surrounded by these enormous ornate buildings on both sides.  I can't even remember all the designer shops we saw, though I was looking for and spotted Dries van Noten.  I didn't find Ann Demeulemeester.  Those are the only two Belgian designers I've heard of; hadn't realised until now that Diane von Furstenberg is also Belgian.  Not that I was buying anyhow, I just wanted to look.  Sometimes I get what the designer hype is about, sometimes not.

So where were we heading?  To an area that we began calling South Africa, owing to the street names Transvaal and Pretoria.  Tomorrow we'll go to South Africa, OK?