This week, I'll be posting my accounts of a recent trip to three cities in the Low Countries: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels.
I briefly alluded to a few of my experiences in the Postcard from Antwerp I filed during the trip, but there was much more to the time I spent in that fairest of cities (swoon)...
Antwerp: so intensely different than Amsterdam from the word "go" that it almost spun me right 'round. For one thing, it lacked the feeling that I had in Amsterdam of America being so violent and scary by comparison, when we could be like the Dutch with big windows and few bars on them and no need for bicycle helmets, just a bell and basket for good clean fun. I saw plenty of broken windows in Antwerp.
Memorably sharp and gritty from the moment I stepped out of the train station, my impression of the city was that it was similiar to Amsterdam in some ways but more big city in the Parisian sense, e.g. a palpable frisson of the requisite urban awareness on the street, which was noticeably absent from Amsterdam. Like in Paris last winter, when a father holding a newborn on the Metro threatened to slap a rambunctious teenage girl in the crowded car we were all standing in, and the racial subtext of the encounter, not to mention the sheer outrageousness of it all, nearly made the whole scene unbearable.
I stepped out of the train station in Antwerp, and couldn't make sense of the public transit map at all. As I was looking at the system diagram, a group of teenage boys, obnoxiously leery in that adolescent sense and all taller than me (and I am not particularly short) came up behind me and sort of blocked me in before joking around with each other in Flemish in a way that made me instinctively walk away. I hadn't planned to splurge on a taxi, generally preferring to walk everywhere on vacation, but they are Mercedes and the first cab in line was driven by a woman, which I thought was pretty cool.
I got to my B&B, Enich Anders, attached to a stone-sculptors' studio and well-located on a small backstreet near the old section of town, and there was a note for me - in Flemish, which if you don't speak or understand it is uniquely mystifying. Luckily, a nearby smoker, happy to be less idle in that way that smokers are, it being a social habit after all, translated it for me. I was to buzz the innkeeper at another B&B a few doors down, which I did, and got my key.
My room (#5) was gorgeous, light, honey-colored floors, fir maybe, a big room with a couch and a kitchenette and a sunny yellow bedroom with private bathroom en suite for 50 euros a night. Of course, I did climb two spiral staircases in the dark when I returned later that evening, and didn't have a telephone, but it was still an extraordinarily lovely setting for a relaxing couple of days. After putting my bags down, I stepped out to explore the immediate neighborhood.
The Dries Van Noten store was around the corner so I popped in and touched everything. Lots of texture, studied forms, nothing frivolous or mass-oriented like mall staple DKNY or, heading that direction, Karl Lagerfeld. It was all gorge-gorge-gorgeous. After getting over how much Antwerp existed in service to some unidentified ethos that did not include the cozy, quaint Dutch ideal of gezellig (in some ways, a good thing: 48 hours in Amsterdam and I was well on my way to becoming a hobbit), I decided to get my hair cut.
I walked into De Client, where through the large storefront windows I could see that all of the stylists had hairstyles that I liked and asked (as politely as I could, in Flemish) if the proprieter spoke English. Of course, he did, and I asked for a haircut. Apparently (not that I would know, I can't read Flemish) it's appointment-only after 5pm, but he decided to make an exception for me. It was a great place -- soul-achingly hip in an unself-conscious way and not a Euromullet in sight.
Also, they serve wine and other assorted drinks and a salon attendant circulates skewered fruit cocktail on a silver tray. I got a stylist who I had just witnessed give an extreme Pixie-style crop to a formerly long-haired girl, whose long hair now laid on the floor beside the stylist's chair. I chose my words carefully: "split ends", "layered", "movement", "bangs", "keep the length". The stylist said she understood but asked me to point out photos in a large look book so that she could ensure that nothing was lost in translation. I pointed to a couple of pics of runway hair that was sculpted but styled loosely and she nodded in agreement. She gestured at the all-one-length style I was currently sporting, if you could call it that, and said, "I want to add, how do you say..." And I said, "Layers?" And she said, "Yes! I want there to be more, the word in English is..." And I said, "Movement?" "Yes!" she said. "You know just what I am thinking!"
My eyes caught hers in the mirror and we both smiled in a universally understood expression of simultaneous friendship, understanding and relief that crossed the cultural and linguistic divide between us. She smoothed out a long lock over my forehead with the tip of the comb and as a final comment before starting to snip away quite dramatically, gestured at my bangs-to-be and said, "And then... we do the pony!" Or something very, very close to that. The haircut turned out to be smashingly hot, the best I've ever had, without compare. She said she was thinking, "Beyonce", but to me it's all Antwerp.
Continuing my stroll after I left the salon, I noticed, with a hint of surprise and awe, that the window mannequins at the Ralph Lauren outpost (note: every major fashion designer, from Hermes to you-name-it, seems to have an outpost in this city of just 400,000 people, and that's not even counting the homegrown talent, most notably the Antwerp Six, that totally dominates the local fashion scene) were clad in head-to-toe black, which isn't even the case in New York. Antwerp is a very chic, very cerebral, somber city. I walked all over that evening, trying to find an ATM that would accept my American bank card, an exasperating experience that nonetheless allowed me to cover a lot of territory. After finally finding one, I was tapped out for further adventures.
I looked in the guidebook for the closest food establishment to my hotel. One was all-seafood (not my preference) and the other a frite shop. I headed for Frituur No. 1. To say that the fries served there are extraordinarily good is an understatement. When I bit into a couple of them I could feel the snap of still-hot oil within the ultra-crisp outer shell. I sat on a bench and began to enjoy my dinner. A crazy bum, stark raving mad in the classical sense, who sort of looked like Santa Claus, except he was wearing a skirt and shouting at the top of his lungs in Flemish, walked up. He was obviously mentally ill, and yet instead of ignoring him like New Yorkers would (not that that's the more communitarian approach) everyone was laughing and pointing at him in what I thought was rather cruel treatment.
Antwerp seemed like it's sort of like that. Many of the streets I walked down that first night in the city were deserted and there weren't many tourists even in the part of town that should have been inundated with them. I did see a procession of weeping Catholics, though, which just added a surreal note to an already unusual evening. The buildings on the Grote Markt square are utterly exquisite -- six stories high with those now familiar to me tall, narrow facades, dominated by windows and glass yet still remaining an imposing presence over the cobblestones below.
Tomorrow: Letter From Antwerp, Part II.
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