One of our indoor activities was visiting the printing press museum in Antwerp. It may not sound like the most exciting thing, but the museum was quite well designed and it has a fabulously informative guide book. Here is an example describing how one Antwerpenaar decided that Dutch was God’s chosen language:
As we meandered through Antwerp, we noticed a strange phenomenon. First we saw a statue of a small Roman soldier holding a giant disembodied hand and briefly wondered if it was small soldier with a normal sized hand or a normal sized soldier with a giant hand? A bit later we saw a giant statue of a hand in one square and then in another, a fountain with a giant soldier holding aloft an even more giant hand (look closely at the photo in the previous post). At this point I realized it was more than a coincidence and looked to trusty old Wikipedia, where I learned that the severed hand is the symbol of the city based on an old Flemish folktale. There used to be a giant who guarded a bridge over the river Scheldt and charged a toll to cross. Those who refused to pay got a nasty surprise when he severed one of their hands and threw it in the river. Eventually an heroic Roman soldier came along and the giant got his comeuppance. It is also the source of the city name: Hand werpen (hand throwing) => Antwerp. Perhaps the best display of severed hands was on the outside of the ten story art museum where every other sandstone panel was adorned with a metal hand.
So many hands at the MAS!
The other American women from work and I decided to make our escape from Carnival this year so we skipped work on Friday and went to Antwerp for the weekend.
The largest cathedral in the lowlands.The weekend largely involved walking through the streets of Antwerp until we got too cold and had to go into a bar to drink Belgian beer and get warm. Fortunately the walking paired well with our other main activity of eating a lot, the main goal being to find cuisine we cannot get in Maastricht. We were fairly successful. The highlights were Ethiopian and Moroccan food. 
Buddha selfie at the MAS (modern art museum).
On Valentine’s day, Hendrik received a lovely Valentine in Dutch in the mail, signed only with T.
My probably terrible translation: You’re cool. Can I keep/love you?
We cannot figure out who sent it or why. We think it must be part of an ad campaign and we are missing the necessary social context to figure out which Dutch company it is from.
Of course it is still less exciting than the anonymous math-themed love poem he got from a secret admirer in grad school, but I’ll declare it his second best message from a secret admirer.
We’ve now established a pattern – having done this two years in a row – of going out for dinner on Valentine’s day at our go-to Italian restaurant.
Here we are on our way to dinner, stepping into the elevator:
Valentine’s day must be a major thing in this country: we observed lots of couples on 2nd or 3rd dates at the surrounding tables.
-Hendrik
I am pleased to report that we had a very quiet, relaxing, domestic weekend, filled with typical domestic tasks like doing the laundry, making a huge amount of whipped cream and putting it on everything, and completely disassembling and overhauling a Sturmey-Archer three-speed internal gear hub.
Hendrik enjoying his third serving of whipped cream for the day.
Today I rode my own little bicycle to work and with the newly cleaned, greased, and replaced parts combined with my pride in having made the repairs myself, it felt like riding the wind.
The darkest hour (when I doubted getting it all back together again).
One of my Christmas presents was a Kindle, which is great except now reading is in direct competition with blog writing during my train commute and blogging appears to be losing. Right now I am reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I’m about halfway through and so far it is deliciously dystopian in a way that only fiction based on 1980’s hysteria can be. I hope I enjoy the rest of it.
Today was the first day with good enough weather to return to our favorite riverside cafe in Eijsden. We enjoyed some fancy coffee and lunch and made it home just in time to avoid the chilly afternoon rain. 
Once home, I decided to perform some bicycle maintenance which got a bit out of hand. It ended with a long order from a bicycle parts website and I will be borrowing Hendrik’s bicycle for the week. What did you expect from an engineer? It is always easier to take things apart than to put them back together again. Ooops.
EisenOrem Adventures 