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Showing posts with label Antwerp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antwerp. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Visiting Antwerp, Belgium's Home of Flemish and Dutch Masterpiece Paintings with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Antwerp, Belgium’s Home of Flemish and Dutch Masterpiece Paintings with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



My husband Laurent and I bundled up Florence, put her in her car seat, and set out for a weekend in Belgium on a cold, winter day in Paris, France.

The destination I had in mind was Antwerp, Belgium to visit the Koninklijk Museum.  The famous Rubens paintings of wealthy, corpulent women were being restored, but there were still galleries full of paintings by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Brueghel, and Memling to admire.

My favorite painting by Abel Grimmers (1570 – 1619) was entitled Springtime.  Springtime showed men planting gardens and making their vegetable gardens tidy and lovely.

That desire to beautify one’s surroundings was something I loved about the French, Belgians, and Dutch.  I liked making a little vacation home for myself like the French still do in this way, too.

We walked from the Museum to Antwerp’s Grande Place where we ate mussels with French fries the way the Belgians do; you dunk the fries in mayonnaise. 

That combination sounds awful, but tastes great with canary-yellow, homemade mayonnaise.

We drank Trappist wheat beers made by monks with our meal.

After dinner, we walked around the cold port and returned to Brussels for a good night’s sleep before returning home to Paris the next day.

You can take a TGV (French Speed Train) from Paris to Brussels (Belgium) as well.

I love how you can go all over France and to Italy and Spain on those TGV trains.


By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




Ruth Paget Selfie