Antwerpen

Went out on Friday night with Myriam. We'd both had a rough week, the honeymoon is over and we just realized how tough the year is going to be with our respective kids. I met her downtown and we headed for a pub we'd stopped in earlier in the week called Celtica. It was a cute little Irish pub downtown we both liked. We had a beer after lunch on Monday and noticed that they have really good happy hour prices (incidentally happy hour lasted from 1 pm until midnight...!) So when we went back on Friday we got a kick out of the fact that we failed to notice that it is a pub downstairs and a discotech upstairs. We went in and had a pint and waited to see if any other couchsurfers would show up. She'd posted a general notice last minute that we were going out and an invite for any and all to join up. A half dozen did show which was fun. We stuck around there for a few rounds and decided to head for greener pastures. One of the folks in the group suggested he'd gotten an invitation to a gallery opening party. There was a new photo exhibit opening on Saturday so they were kicking it off with a party. We went there for an hour or two, had a drink and danced a bit. It was fun, but we were ready to go sit down again and the only place to sit in the gallery was the stairs so we took it back to Celtica. A few people dropped off to go home on our way back to the pub and the rest of us marched on. Eventually Myriam and I were the only two left of our bunch. When we finally decided to leave I looked at my watch and it was 4:30! yikes! I'm so used to last call reigning in my evenings that I wasn't really paying attention.
Myriam and I had plans to meet Kelly and Gudrun in Antwerp the next day (or rather in a few hours) so I suggested rather than each of us take a taxi home and meet up in a couple hours that we split a taxi back to Etterbeek and she could just spend the night in the guestroom. That worked out fine so we left from here first thing in the morning (meaning around 10 am....we were supposed to be in Antwerp at 1030...oops). Anyway, a bus, metro and a train ride later we met Kelly and Gudrun at the gorgeous train station in Antwerp. I had to make a first priority trip to the pharmacy to get some aspiring for the hangover which had set in about the time we stepped onto the train. It was a lucky thing I didn't wake up with that headache or I never would have gone to Antwerp in the first place.
We went for lunch at an Indian place before Gudrun had to go to work. Food was good but Myriam was really sick so she never touched her food. I don't know if it was a hangover or the flu or food poisoning, but she was not having a fun time. After lunch Gudrun went to work and the rest of us went shopping/sightseeing. We went to the great market where the postcard buildings are (you know the obligatory postcard shot of the most impressive architecture in town) and then we walked to the river. From there we walked back towards shopping areas where we poked around a very cute jewelry store (no diamonds though, this one was mostly semi-precious stone and silver) and half a dozen book stores. We went to the gallery and had a hand scrub demonstration at this boutique soap shop. It was really nice sugar scrub with essential oils etc in it, if it weren't completely unnecessary and out of my price range I would have bought a jar, but alas...
Eventually Myraim's stomach recovered and we got some diner at the swank cafeteria at the gallery before heading out of town again. Myriam split in Bruxelles and I continued on to Leuven with Kelly. We had been planning on meeting her friend John (I think that's how he spelled it, it's pronounced like Yawn) and going out in Leuven, but we'd both had enough walking that day and I'd certainly had enough bars for the weekend, so we just called it a night and all three of us watched some TV at home (all four of us once Gudrun came home from work).
A little bit of a tedious story and quite anti climactic, but it was a really fun weekend.