Le Monde - A Poetic Travail » Antwerp

The Year That Was

Cuckoo — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:40:41 +0000

Another year. Another set of to-dos. And a time to take stock… Don’t frown for this late post, we are still in January month.

Year 2008 was a good year in terms of travel for me. I managed to balance between my work related and personal travels. All the trips were short since now I don’t go on long term trips.
In the year 2008 I have been to a few places abroad (USA & Europe) and in India. I am yet to write about my foreign trips mostly because I hardly get to see a newer place or anything new about an old place. And I am yet to write about some of the trips done within India last year as well.

New York

Antwerp

On homeland, apart from my usual trips to Delhi which I have stopped counting, the year started with a two day trip to Nagaon, few hours drive from Mumbai… not posted yet. Then a 10 days trip to Goa happened which seemed very less for the kind of variety it offers us. After 17 posts, there is still lot remaining to write about. This sojourn kept me going for first few months of the year.

Goa

Then after two short trips abroad, towards the end of rainy season a trip to Lonavala was a refreshing change. Will go there again. It has much more than what we experienced.

Lonavala

In November, there was another trip to Delhi.

New Delhi

And from there out of the blue I could snatch a day to visit Amritsar. It was totally a different experience altogether and I am yet to wrap up the stories about it.

Amritsar

Come December, and a trip was planned for Ganapatipule with extended family, a strikingly beautiful coastal place in Konkan region. My first but definitely not the last visit there.

Within Mumbai city, besides daily regular chaotic places, I could see Mani Bhavan, Sanjay Gandhi Park, Bandra Fort, Elephanta (thrice), Gateway (n times) and so on.

Mumbai

Let’s hope the coming year brings me more. Will write later about my wish-list.

P.S.- Hmmm… people do not travel for months and they maintain a successful travel blog; I travel so much that I am unable to maintain my travel blog. Irony.. they call it.

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Antwerp – The Harbour City

Cuckoo — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:42:00 +0000

So, that was Antwerp.. the beautiful romantic city of diamonds and silvers. But do you know Antwerp is famous for one more reason ?

‘The Scheldt river owes its existence to God, and Antwerp owes its existence to the Scheldt river’ is a popular saying that shows how important the river Scheldt is for the city of Antwerp. Yes, Antwerp also has Europe’s second largest and world’s fourth largest harbour. And its operating assets such as cranes, buildings, bridges, docks, roads, the electricity distribution network, data and stock management, planning, budgeting, reporting, performance tracking, internal and external outsourcing are being managed by IBM .

The following clip is taken from my colleague’s handycam, showing a passenger ship at the port. Before that day I had never seen a ship in my life, let alone this big. This time I didn’t have my camera so showing only the clips. Audio is bad, bear with me.

Of all the ports on the North Sea, Antwerp is the most central vis-à-vis the largest European production and consumption centers. Although the open North Sea is about 60 km away from Antwerp, the river is so large that sea-going vessels and large oil tankers can sail to deliver their products in the vast port area of the city.

Though the more common language in Belgium is French, this small city speaks Dutch, perhaps because of its proximity to Netherlands. Most buildings are old but a treat to eyes.. total architectural wonders. Many Indian restaurants, one doesn’t feel out of place.

Not as big as the ‘Grand’Place’ of Brussels, but certainly equally beautiful and crowded is the ‘Grote Markt’ of Antwerp, also known as Market Square.

In the background the tower of Our Lady’s Cathedral completes the magnificent view.

One of the grandest buildings in Antwerp is the ‘Central Station’. It welcomes visitors who arrive by train in Antwerp like a modern day cathedral. The part of the station where the platforms are, is covered by an immense metal and glass dome (typical for turn-of-the-century railway stations in Europe).

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Antwerp – The Diamond City

Cuckoo — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:21:00 +0000

This city is called diamond city as world’s one of the finest diamonds are produced and more than 70% of all diamonds in the world are traded in Antwerp. Not going into statistics but do you know who does the major chunk of business here ? Well, one can find many Indians settled in Antwerp mostly from Gujarati / Marwari business community. Sorry, I don’t know the difference between them except that Gujratis are from Gujrat and Marwaris are from Marwar (something like my first logic). Someone please enlighten me on this. Needless to say why I was surprised initially when I saw many Indian restaurants there.

In spite of this museum being adjacent to the station, we could manage only about an hour’s quality time inside it. Again this multi-storied museum is the largest diamond museum in the world. According to me, minimum of one full day is required to do justice with it.

It is also called ‘interactive museum’ as there is an audio-visual guide which enables us to ‘interact’ with the museum in the select few languages of our choice and at our own pace. It is an ‘image and sound’ system which takes visitors through the entire procedure of diamond processing – from mines to end product including training, teaching etc. at various levels.

On each floor there are some treasure chambers whose wonderful collections of jewelry offer a treat to eyes. They have diamond jewelries from the sixteenth century till the present day including replica of the British Crown Jewels containing two of the world’s largest diamonds- the Koh-I-Noor and the Cullinan I. The only other place I saw more realistic replica of British crown was in Sydney.

The museum also has section which shows us the qualities of diamonds, such as color, hardness, refraction of light etc. On some days we can see diamond cutters at work too.

The four C’s – Carat, Colour, Clarity and Cut – determine the quality and value of a polished diamond. Since this is not a place to lecture about diamonds, will tell you very little basics about these four C’s.

Carats – Weight is expressed in carats, each carat divided into 100 points.
Colour – Colourless diamonds are the most valuable ones. The more tinted colour they have, the less expensive they are.
Clarity – Clarity or purity of a diamond is determined by the number, size and location of inclusions or clouds (internal impurities). These can vary from vvs (very very small) to s(small) category.
Cut – Even if a diamond has perfect colour and clarity, a poorly cut diamond will lose sparkle, beauty and value. The cut affects brightness and classified as Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor. Some common diamond cuts are round, oval, pear, heart, emerald.

Fortunately we could take some photographs without flash in some sections of this tight security museum.

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Antwerp – Silvers all the Way

Cuckoo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:43:00 +0000

Next time when I went to Antwerp, I tried to explore a bit more. When you go on such short trips to a city, it is extremely difficult to take out time for doing so specially if it is a weekday. Fortunately, this time I was to go there on a Friday, decided to stay overnight. By the time we came out of office on Friday, it was above eight in the evening.
While going back to the hotel, stopped at the main shopping street, Meir. It is around 1.5 to 2 kms stretch and connects the Central Station to the Grote Markt (No, I didn’t miss an ‘e’, that’s the correct spelling). The houses on both sides are old but gold. We had our dinner in one of the restaurants and went to our hotel to decide on next day’s schedule.

So Saturday was kept to see a few things in Antwerp before returning back to Brussels in evening. Next morning I was to fly back to India from Brussels.
We (me and my two colleagues) short listed two museums to see.. Silver museum and Diamond museum. Both were very big, time consuming but we wanted to give it a go.

Silvers and diamonds.. Hmmm any female will jump with joy. When it struck to both my male colleagues, for a moment they looked at each other and were anxious to know about my likeness for jewellery and my shopping capabilities. ) Fortunately for them, for jewellery I prefer to do only window shopping.

Since Diamond Museum is very near to Central Station from where we had to take the train later for Brussels, we kept it for the afternoon session.

Next morning, we visited beautiful Sterckshof Silver Museum first. From station it took us 20-25 minutes to reach by bus. Surrounded by a lush green garden, on the edge of the city, the museum is a beauty to watch. It is in a picturesque castle called Sterckshof, hence the name. It was a journey to the treasures of Belgian silver production. If I can, I will post a scanned map from the brochure I have.

The museum is full of antique silver artifacts. One floor had beautifully crafted cutlery, knife, spoons, plates, bowls, tea/coffee sets… all of different sizes. The lower floor has different theme based rooms like bedroom will have Clocks, mirror frames, photo frames, clothes hanger etc. Study room would contain different shaped pen stands, cigars, lamps etc. The other rooms had things like a chair, swords, shields.. you name it, they have it. Before visiting the museum, I had never imagined as how many things could be made out of silver.

It also shows different techniques used for processing of silver including how to take care of it.

Inside the museum, for security reasons the photography was strictly prohibited so this was the last picture taken before we made our grand entry to the museum. Note the entrance door – a very heavy metal door of height till first floor.

The main entrance.

But looking at the scant crowd (there was hardly any person), I guess this museum is not very popular.

This is a very small video clip taken from the bus of our visit to the museum. I took it from my colleague to show it to you.

Once out of the museum, we again took a bus back to the station. Had a quick light lunch and went inside the Diamond Museum…