Antwerp Underground

15 April 2007

During the Golden Years in the 16th century, Antwerp was a striving city with lots of canals built for the purpose of trade and business. Now in the 21st century, as the Golden Years passed by, those canals had also gone underground. Over the centuries, as the city progressed, people vaulted the canals in order to build houses over it, as such bit by bit, the canals became buried underground...

So here we are on this day to explore those underground canals (they called it the "ruien"). Dress in green protection suit and boots, holding our torches, we have a tour along the 1.6km long Ruien walk. First we have to take a small boat ride, then out of the boat and start walking on muddy wet uneven canal floors. Bit of scary at first, becoz we don't know what are we stepping on, it was dark slippery wet and yucky, so you know...hmmm...

On the walls of the vaults, sometimes there are crystallic shiny stuff that are actually salt crystals. We claims that they could be diamonds, since Antwerp is a trading place for diamonds...

Unfortunately it was not allowed to take pictures, so only this little picture, on the boat...

In addition to that, we had more tours, however this time it was the above-ground city tour of Antwerp.

On some buildings, there are some statues of Virgin Mary craved out of rocks and still maintained in the original way. Even the building is pulled down/renovated/whatever, the statue will still remain.

Steen Castle: You can see a difference in the wall colours. The darker portion used to be part of the fortress wall around the Antwerp city.

This used to be the Butcher House, HQ for the butcher's community, also the slaughter house for cattles...and the surrounding streets were all named after some kind of meat (yah...'repen' is some kind of meat).

Also some buildings had those little towers on the edge of their houses, that were meant to watch out for ships arriving at the habour, so that they can run out to the habour to claim their goods.

Thanks to the @ people for organizing this trip :D