Antwerp Graffiti

 Like any contemporary city, Antwerp has its share of wall painting and graffiti. They add doses of liveliness and color to an otherwise somber old city.

Antwerp Museum of Printing

The Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, a Unesco World Heritage Site, "is a printing plant and publishing house dating from the Renaissance and Baroque periods." For bookish folks like us, it's a fascinating collection of old presses, type faces, books, and paintings about books and printing. It also teaches youngsters about printing at their level. Unexpectedly fascinating.

Antwerp Ferris Wheel

The silver-gray and red surface of a big ferris wheel, set against a dark gray Antwerp sky, made a strikingly luminous image. I couldn't resist making several variations of the scene.

DIVA Museum Antwerp

The DIVA Museum for Diamonds, Jewelry, and Silver in Antwerp opened in 2018, combining two previous museums for diamonds and silver. It's a place of great beauty and luxury, but also with an informative live exhibit on diamond cutting and polishing.

Rubens House Antwerp

Perhaps the best-known resident of Antwerp was the great painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). His former house is now a museum to his life and work. Rather than try to make photographic reproductions of his paintings, I focused on some sculpture, architectural details, and the garden of the Rubens House, ending with a self-portrait of the painter as a young man.

 

Antwerp Train Station

We've just returned from a long trip to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Photos from these tours will fill the blog for several months. But to start, we had to get to that part of the world, which involved flying from Portland to Amsterdam, then to Istanbul, and then to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

As usual, we took a couple of days in a hotel in Schipol Airport to rest for the next phase of the journey. (And to get covid tests.) But instead of our usual visits to Amsterdam's great museums, we decided to explore three other major cities in the Low Countries: Antwerp in Belgium, and Rotterdam and Leiden in the Netherlands. 

I'll start with the Antwerp train station.

Downtown Portland Scenes