Antwerp

Now that I officially have my camera charged and back in action, I can actually start posting stuff for my blogs again :) Not that I couldn't have done that before, but blogs are better with visuals!

Barb, her daughter Jess as well as Rayna and I ventured off to Antwerp today. To be honest, our main reason for going was to collect the new Antwerp Starbucks mug (yes, it's a sickness and I've admitted to it already). We only had a lil over two hours to hang out in the lovely city since Barb needed to get back to base in time to pick up her son from Camp Adventure.

SO, we caught a train from a lil station in Neerpelt... cute lil place and we managed to get a set of seats with a table for the hour ride to Antwerp.

Once we reached our destination, we started searching the station for our beloved Starbucks. The central train station is gorgeous! It actually reminds me of Liverpool station in London with all the intricate ironwork and glass. Anyway, I think Barb and I looked a lil possessed considering that was the huge reason why we were there..ya know, aside from wanting to roll around in diamonds and such. Luckily, the Antwerp Starbucks had PLENTY of mugs in stock! Just between her and I, we cleared our eight mugs since we had friends from back home that were wanting one. They even had a lil back stock of  them displayed behind the Barista's! I think Rayna was telling us that we should wait till we were ready to get back on the train to pick up the mugs since we might not wanna carry 'em around..but after dealing with personal experience of places running out of mugs, I didn't wanna chance it. Even the Barista told us that those cups sell out really fast since people are finding out that there's another place, aside from Brussels, that has mugs in Belgium. Woot!

The official Antwerp mug:

By the way...the Antwerp Central Station was the "scene" for a gorilla style dance done about a year or so ago.. several of these spontaneous dances popped up in different train stations around Europe..here's the one I'm talking about (we were standing right around the same area where the video was filmed):

From there, we made our way over to a pizza place that Rayna had talked about. They have hundreds of Ci ante bottles hanging from the ceiling (fake, of course) with grape vines everywhere. To be honest, the staff didn't come off all that friendly, but the pizza was pretty good. I ended up with a Gorgonzola pizza while Rayna gorged on a Margarita, and Barb had what looked like a Veggie style. Good stuff and pretty cheap...they just need to work on the staff being  a lil "warmer" to customers.

To burn some calories, we made our way over to the church since Barb and I are fans of European architecture. Thankfully, we had plenty of opportunity to find some pretty buildings (Belgium's good for that)!  I gotta say, some of the statues around the town made me kinda laugh since all of 'em looked the same....Shakespearian style I guess would be a good way of describing it.

This bulding looked pretty cool since it had an interesting statue on the top that was holding some lightening bolts..sorry the picture isn't too detailed, but the statue looks like it had gold polka dots on it!

After a minor lil hike, we finally found the Church! Sadly, we didn't have enough time to actually go inside and check it out since we were on a time schedule to catch the train back to Neerpelt. Plus, the exterior of the building was under construction, so I had to get a lil creative when taking the pic to try to get as little scaffolding and netting as possible, lol.

While we were relaxing for a lil bit in the center, I could hear the clip - clop of some horses and managed to catch a pic of 'em! On the side of the carriage, it had "Palm" on it which is a pretty good Belgian beer... I just thought it looked pretty cool since the horses looked like the Palm horse (their logo).

After we were done taking our touristy pics, we made our way back over to the train station. When we were originally heading to the Church, I saw that there was a "Lush" store on the corner of one of the streets!  I had NO idea that there was a Lush in Belgium!! I've seen it over in London, but I've never bought anything there considering the British Pound is retarded and I don't like over paying for things. I mean, who LIKES paying more than they should? No one. Ha! SO, I made my merry way into the Lush shop on our way back and picked up some bath bombs as well as some soap that smells like heaven. Ahhhhh... now that I know they're here, I'll be making more trips to Antwerp more often, hahaa!

UHHHH-Mazing Bath Bombs and soap :) From left to right then middle: Blackberry, Honeybee, Butterball (all 3 are bath bombs) and Honey I Washed The Kids (soap). You can shop online with them at: http://www.lush.com/

Once we finished dropping some Euro in the Lush store, we continued our journey over to the train station. Remember how we stopped at the Starbucks when we first arrived to get our mugs? Well, we hit them up again so we could get some Frappachinos. Ya know, a lil reward for ourselves since we're not blessed with one "locally". Most of the Starbucks are about an hour to an hour and a half away from us, (Brussels, Antwerp, Aachen), lol. Well, I guess between the time it took for us to order our Frappachino's and getting to our train platform.. we literally had missed our train. As in: It was still on the platform but right as we were scrurrying to verify with a Conductor that this was indeed "our" train.. it closed it's doors and took off. LOL. Just our luck! Oh well.. it gave us about a half hour to sit and enjoy our drinks, laugh about getting left behind and plotting our next trip to achieve another Starbucks mug.

Our next train showed up and we hopped on, although we were cautious considering it was 20 minutes early and we didn't want to get stuck on the wrong one, lol. I have bad memories of that happening during Christmas and returning from Brussels! Once we figured out that it WAS the one we needed, everyone else decided to start boarding.. I think they were letting us be the dumb guinea pigs or something since NO ONE was on the train except us. HA!

This lil guy was so cute! It looks like he smiled for me..but after I took the pic, he got grumpy and hid behind is owner for the rest of the train ride. I guess he's not a fan of paparazzi!

Rayna enjoying some Lush Times (pure awesome-ness).

Barb and Jess taking a candid shot. I had to do it, haha

All in all, the whirl wind trip to Antwerp turned out really well! I know we'll end up going back again since I'm sure Eric will wanna check it out. I definitely want to go back to the church and check out the inside of it, as well as finding the fountain that's pictured on the front of the mug we picked up... I saw every other statue except that particular one, lol.