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Antsy in Antwerp
But it was a good break, really
Like millions of others, I had been living and breathing the US election for months: high anxiety with little to show for it except weird dreams between bouts of sleeplessness.
As it turns out, that anxiety was piddle in the face of the global cataclysm delivered by the American voters this week.
So for a bit of a breather, come with me on my pre-election three-day visit to Antwerp. It was good to get out of my dusty Paris apartment and wander a different set of cobbled streets for a while.
I love Antwerp — I have since a brief visit seven years ago, when my son and I were doing an early fall circuit of western Europe. Antwerp is only two hours from Paris on the Eurostar, and the station — oh, the station! I was gobsmacked then and once again last week by this architectural gem. You see the outside in the photograph above.
Here is the interior, a grandiose gesture to rail travel designed by Louis Delacenserie at the end of the nineteenth century (the same decade that produced the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre III here in Paris).
