24hr in Antwerp

5th of February - Spontaneously book two train tickets from Rotterdam to Antwerp and book an accommodation there. This was the result of my girlfriend and I being bored and not feeling motivated to do anything on that day. Furthermore, it was a Chinese New Year! So, we had to try to do something fun or at least nice and entertaining to ourselves. :-)

We arrived in Antwerp at around noon on that day and just started exploring the city right away (well, we went to the tourist information desk at the train station and asked for recommendations as well). But we then just went straight to the city centre and walked around on the main street albeit stopping at some shops that catches our attention. We also went to a church that was under maintenance but it was the church where a famous painter' body, Rubens, was laid to rest. Not long after exiting the church, we decided to have lunch and we luckily picked a very nice cafe to have lunch (as shown in the photos below). After lunch, we decided to continued to look around for nice and unique shops before deciding to go to our accommodation at around 16:00pm. We had a very nice accommodation near Antwerp University (a very nice looking university as we also took a look at and went in on the way to the accommodation).

We chilled at the accommodation for a while and then went exploring the china town, city centre and market street to look for a possible place to fix my backpack as well... We decided to explore china town for dinner and we found a very nice small Thai restaurant where the owners were very friendly to us and kept us laughing and smiling for the entire time. They also recommended places for us to visit that we really appreciated but we couldn't go to most places because we would be leaving in the late afternoon of the very next day. So after dinner we went off to explore more of the smaller streets in the city as well as in the old town, we even walked all the way to the river but because it was cold and windy and we also wanted to grab some snacks from a supermarket that is quite a distance away, we didn't spend much time there. For the night, we only had a movie night and just went to bed.

The next morning, the host made us really nice breakfast for us and we decided to just chill inside for the most part and spend some quality time together at the place because the weather was looking a bit horrible and accommodation was very cosy. :-) So it made sense...

We decided to go to Rubens house after leaving the accommodation and spend a couple of hours there before my backpacking finally broke... We then search for a nice local cafe for lunch, which we found but unsurprisingly expensive. It was a rainy day but after lunch we decided to explore the shopping street again and just to kill sometime before our bus would leave. When the time came, off we went back and when we arrived at home we just had soup for dinner and just felt surreal about the trip as now we were back in Rotterdam but the past 24 hour-ish were spent in another country.... But I personally loved it even though it was not much of a photography trip nor did it feature nice weather with many interesting places. But it was the moments I get to spend with my girlfriend and the quality time out of the spontaneous decision that we spent together makes it nice and memorable. By focusing more on the person rather than a machine makes this trip not replicable and even more of a treasure memory within my heart and wanting to do this trip even more. :-)

Here are some pictures: :-)