Diamond shopping in Antwerp

One of the best things about living in Europe is the breadth of different experiences you are exposed to with a much lower entry barrier than back home. I can't say I grew up dreaming of buying a diamond ring in Antwerp, but if I had, it would have required meticulous planning, a month off work, days of flying, and thousands of dollars of expenditure before you even got to the diamond itself. Here, it was more like, okay so we're going to buy a diamond? Well, obviously we'll drive 45 minutes up the road to a city which has been synonymous with the diamond trade for centuries. I couldn't find a definitive answer on whether it is actually cheaper to get diamonds in Antwerp (and a lot of the online advice was based on people having to travel to and stay in Antwerp for the purchase, thus inflating their budgets), but the amount of diamonds you have to choose from is unparalleled anywhere else. According to Wikipedia, as of 2012, about 84% of the world's rough diamonds passed through Antwerp's tiny "Square Mile" diamond district, with US$16 billion in polished diamonds going through the Antwerp exchanges annually. So whatever you're looking for, chances are you can find it here, and if you can't, they'll make it for you.

What I don't think I've ever heard anyone say about buying a diamond ring is, holy hell it's intimidating. We first went on a bit of a dry run in Brussels, trying to get an idea of what things cost and what our budget should be. (I know that's not the way round you're meant to set a budget, but hey.) I wanted first to go to sort of chain or mall type jewellery shops, as I thought that would be less intimidating. Turns out chain jewellery shops don't really exist in Brussels. We found a few larger places in the middle of Brussels and circled nervously, gathering the courage to go in.

Once inside, the service wasn't great and the selection wasn't great either. They seemed to have only a couple of different models of diamond solitaires, which seemed strange. Plus I asked to see diamond solitaires in French and the woman brought a tray of wedding bands. We looked, confused, for a few minutes wondering if you first chose the metal you wanted, and then they made you choose the setting, and then the stone, but no, she just didn't understand. So we tried again, and she brought out weird dress rings. "Oh no, I just want something plain with one diamond", I said. "Oh, you want a solitaire" she replied. Um, yeah.

The second place we tried was an "Antwerp diamonds" place, which seems to be the Belgian way of indicating a shop that has a lot of different rings and different grade diamonds and you just put two and two together and they set the ring for you. This place had some pretty rings but it was a warm late summer/early autumn day and the shop was tiny and overly hot and I just spent the whole time in there dripping with sweat and feeling like the frumpiest mess on the planet, and so I couldn't meet the jeweller's eye, let alone concentrate on the glamorous business of diamond purchasing when I felt like my face was melting off. I've yet to see a movie where the dashing heroine goes diamond shopping with her foundation dripping, but trust me to make the occasion as unromantic and unaspirational as possible.

We retired defeated from the field of battle, and between the trauma of our first attempt and being busy with other things for a few weeks, it was over a month before we tried again. I did some further research online, locating specific places in Antwerp with a good reputation and drilling myself on haggling techniques and the fact that they're not better than me just because they work in a shop that sells expensive things. (They're not worse than me either, of course, but just trying to buck myself up.)

After a walk up and down Vestingstraat, a drab street currently undergoing roadworks but probably not very fancy at the best of times, we finally felt ready to move from window shopping to going into our first store. We started with Adin, which sells antique and vintage jewellery, partly because I thought it would be kind of cool to end up with a piece with a history and a one-off design, and partly because either you love it or you don't. You're unlikely to end up fussing around for ages trying to find what specific combination of the 4 Cs fit your budget and heart's desire. Luckily for us on our first attempt, the woman who helped us was super sweet and friendly and very patient with showing us everything, and the owner (I think) also came over and explained how diamond cuts were different in antique jewellery. We saw some beautiful pieces, but in the end I decided they weren't quite my style for something I'd be wearing day in and day out. I tend to go for plain jewellery, and was sure I would end up with a classic solitaire. But it was fun to see the vintage pieces just in case.

If I was going to go for something out of left field, this would have been a strong contender

The emerald Art Deco one was pretty, but I couldn't see wearing it every day

You really notice all the little cat scratches when you go ring shopping

These used a sort of illusion setting to make the centre stone look bigger. You could definitely get some decent-value rings if you committed to the vintage route

There was no hard sell and we left with a lot more confidence than we came in with, so I'm glad that was our first port of call. We went a couple of doors down to a place that wasn't on the list, but had some pretty designs in the window, Diamonds on Vesting. Again, there was no hard sell, and there was no problem writing down all the different specifications and prices and taking photos. There was a lovely twisted "coquette" ring, which really highlighted the diamond without being too obviously twisty.

It was kind of frustrating that many of the rings didn't fit on my fingers, but oh well.

We went to one more place on Vestingstraat, where they didn't let us take photos, but where I tried on a blue diamond (kinda cool), and then went to Diamondland, which has the biggest diamond showroom in Antwerp. A lot of reviews online said they took the time to really explain all the different diamond information to you, and so this was a good place to start. We actually went here first but they were too busy to see us, and I'm glad they were. They didn't do a hard sell, exactly, but this was the only place that made me feel uncomfortable out of all the places we visited. Rather than an aggressive approach, they took the buddy buddy "what's your name? wow, that name's so popular in my country! where do you come from? you look so much like my daughter it's amazing!" tactic. I did like that when she "swore", she said "corpus Christi!" though, which gave an agreeably medieval flavour to proceedings.

She took us to an upstairs room and started pulling out little envelopes full of different diamonds, from tiny .15 carat up to a carat. It was kind of cool to see the sparkly little beggars rolling around (and I actually managed to drop a one-carat diamond (supposedly) worth about 10,000€ which she had put loosely into a setting for us to look at), but it didn't take long for us both to (silently) be quite sure we wouldn't be buying here.

The sales technique was also not cool. She took a diamond which, according to the envelope it came in, was worth around 4,200€, and put it together with a ring that apparently she didn't know the price of, but guessed was worth around 300€. Put those figures together in the calculator and magically came up with 5000€. I didn't bother pointing out that you didn't need to be a maths genius to see that didn't add up, but she next assured us that she would go and talk to her boss and see if she could get a good discount for us. Normally they could give around 8-10% and she wasn't sure she could get that much, but she would really try hard for us. We had barely time to stifle our eye rolls before her boss "accidentally" came in, found a price tag of 200€ on the ring (yay! it's already cheaper!) and did some sums on the calculator, which ended up reading 3955€, although she said 3900€ out loud. Our original saleswoman cooed over what an amazing deal it was, and once her boss had left, wrote down the price of 3950€ for us, pointing out that she was even taking an extra 5€ off. In the store, we both politely said thank you very much, we'll have to think about it, yes, 5000€ down to 3950€, that is quite the discount, we'll sleep on it. But once outside, we were both like "geez, trying to take us for a couple of country rubes?!?"

So, drum roll... What did we end up getting? As I said, I was always sure that I would go for a plain solitaire - timeless, elegant, classic. But the more I researched and thought about it, the less sure I got. Maybe it would be better to go for something with a slightly less icky reputation than diamonds, both in the blood diamond sense and in the monopoly cartel sense (although apparently the monopoly has been broken/weakened in recent times)? I'm certainly not going to start accusing people of being sheeple falling for the slick marketing of Big Diamond, but I started to think more about the possibility of getting a coloured stone, even in the diamond capital of the world. Our reason for going into the aforementioned Diamonds on Vesting was actually some "sapphires" in the window (turns out they were tanzanites). Tanzanites are a rare gemstone (much rarer than diamonds) only found in a small part of Tanzania, with a blue-violet hue which can change depending on the angle. They are also one of the birthstones for December, which is a fun coincidence. Jules made me sleep on it - for longer than I would have liked, since the jeweller went away to China in the meantime - but we finally decided on something that I would not have imagined but I absolutely love!

Two tanzanite and diamond rings to choose between

Final choice! Thought I'd better get a manicure for when we actually got to bring this baby home

Transformed to a vivid blue in the early morning light

And, you guys, guess what??? I bargained! Me! Who's scared of everything! The ring was in platinum, and on our first visit the guy mentioned that it would be cheaper in white gold. So Jules and I fixed some numbers between ourselves that we would be willing to go to for the white gold or the platinum setting, and then I said to the guy, "our budget was X" (about 2500€ cheaper than the sticker price), "how close could we get to that figure with the white gold setting?" He didn't want to go quite that low for the white gold, but he offered us the platinum setting for basically the secret price we had agreed beforehand we wanted to pay for it, which saved almost 1500€! Possibly we could have haggled harder and got more off, but I was pretty damn proud of myself and pleased we got to the price we wanted, so I'll take that as a big win :)

Meet the parents

Arrgh, I've been so slack updating this, I know. It seems like it's endemic in the blogosphere, with people shutting down their blogs left and right or just not updating that often, but that's no excuse. I'd like to say it's because of my busy social life, but truth is, I still have no friends in Brussels, so it's not that. I'd like to lay the responsibility on baths. I have a bit of a bath addiction, and it takes time to soak in the tub. Okay, it's not the worst vice the world has ever seen, but it has taken a toll on my water bill (90€ for a quarter, ouch!) Apart from just that it's nice to lie in a tub of warm, bubbly water and read, I think the appeal is that it somehow feels like a liminal space beyond the routines of everyday life, somewhere where you're forced to disconnect from your phone and the internet and just exist in a figurative and literal bubble. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. Sometimes a bath is just a bath.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about bathing, I'm here to catch up on the actual outdoor things I've been doing. October was a busy month, or at least the second half of it was, starting with my parents' visit to Brussels. As I mentioned, this was a bit of a nervewracking prospect, since of course it was the first time they were meeting Jules. Well, I think everything went very well. Jules even got through an entire 5-day Madrid holiday with them, which is much more than I think I could manage if it were the other way around!

My parents had been to Brussels before, notably last year when we came to Belgium for the Spa Grand Prix, so this time we mostly concentrated on day trips to get a glimpse of the rest of Belgium. On Friday, we went to Ghent and magically discovered a whole new, beautiful area to the city that we completely missed when we went with my sister back in July. Best of all, the weather, after an initial spot of drizzle, was sunny and unseasonably warm. I really felt like we'd been transported to some southern clime as we relaxed on a terrace sipping wine and eating local specialities (I tried the waterzooi, very good).

Me and Jules in Ghent

Lining up in height order

The main event was the Ghent Design museum, specifically chosen to appeal to my mum's sensibilities. It was a nice museum, small enough to not exhaust you, but large enough to have quite a lot of beautiful and interesting objects. The cutest thing was the little Playmobile figurines they put in many of the display cases, making a quirky little treasure hunt through the museum.

My parents' visit coincided with Jules's birthday, so we headed out on the Friday night for a nice dinner at a local restaurant. The concept of the restaurant is "slow food", and being run by a couple - the husband cooks and the wife takes care of the front of house - it certainly lives up to the name. However, along with the slow food vibe comes a relaxed, family-style ambience. By which I don't mean that there are children running all over the place (shudder), I mean that from having to ring the doorbell to enter to the small space feeling like someone's set up half-a-dozen tables in their front room, it just feels like you've popped around to a relative's house for Christmas dinner or something. That possibly makes it seem awful, but when the hostess makes sure you've got nibbles and a gratis glass of bubbly plopped down in front of you shortly after you walk in (and keeps topping up your glass throughout the evening), you find you don't mind having to wait quite some time in between courses. We all had a really lovely evening (and yummy food), and by the end of the night there were hugs for all of us from the woman, particularly for my mum, who went back for two or three (you can't keep topping up my mum's glass without such consequences).

Birthday boy with my mum

We somehow managed to haul ourselves up and out on Saturday to hit the road for Antwerp, since my mum had commented on an earlier blog post that she'd like to visit. Again, it was a lovely day, and we basically retraced much the same steps as Jules and I on our previous visit, including seeing Saint Peter's church again in the sunshine and doing a spot of (very successful shopping). It's hard to believe that our first, relatively cold and definitely grey visit was in June, whereas this October trip was warm and sunny, but I'm definitely not complaining.

Just before I passed out

For dinner, we went to one of the semi-fancy seafood places on Saint Catherine's Square. I suppose this was meant to be a bit of a posher treat, but it suffered a bit in comparison with the delicious food and friendly atmosphere of the night before. The ambience was very cold, and the waiter annoyed me by doing the thing where they keep your bottle of wine in parts unknown and only come to dole it out when they see fit. I know this is supposed to be posh, but it's just irritating. Let me serve my own wine. I suppose there's a way to do it well, but this does not involve me having to flag the waiter down to ask for my glass to be refilled, as was the case on this occasion. The food was fine, but quite a bit pricier than the night before, and I think we all much preferred the fun atmosphere of the other place.

On Sunday, we checked out the antiques market in Grand Sablon, and I added to my (small) collection of Gien faience (thanks, M&D), before fitting in a bit of chocolate shopping - got to be done in Belgium, right? Then I actually can't remember what we did before eating dinner (a nap, I think) at my parents' apartment, which was followed by me getting horrifically sick. I was meant to go back to work for three days between their visit and our trip to Madrid, but I ended up at home sick, which of course probably looked totally fake, but honestly wasn't! I always feel like everyone at work thinks I'm faking illness at the best of times, so that was doubly the case this time. It could have been worse though, it wasn't the worst timing in the world falling between two exciting long weekends. Next time, Madrid...

Le plat pays

One of the advantages of Belgium is that its small size, relatively centrally-located capital and long history means that you can get to many interesting places within a couple of hours - and of course, you're spoilt for choice if you want to go beyond its borders as well. So it would be silly not to make the most of living here by getting out and exploring ce plat pays.

Before I started work, Jules and I took advantage of our free time to take a day trip to Antwerp, where I'd never been before. To be honest, a lot of the day was taken up with shopping. Even though we stuck to chains, Antwerp has a great reputation as a fashion capital, and I think a little of that must have rubbed off on to the chain stores too, as we both managed to pack multiple purchases into our day. To add to the authentically Belgian experience, we had Wagamama for lunch, which was fun (and tasty). And Jules had Starbucks, so he was happy.

But we did have a little time for some cultural pursuits, mainly wandering around the city on a fairly grey day:

Grand Place, Antwerp

At the train station

Inside the train station

The absolute highlight, though, was St. Paul's church. Jules had a city maps app that gave some short descriptions of tourist sites, and it just said that this one had a good collection of statues in it. So it felt kind of magical to track down this out-of-the-way church (after first trying to go to a different one which was closed) and stumble upon an exterior tableau of the crucifixion, made up of 63 life-sized statues which date back to the 18th century, collectively known as the Calvary. We had the place to ourselves for the most part, and it really felt like a special discovery, with a peaceful, gloomy atmosphere no doubt helped by the dull weather. (Looking online, it seems to be relatively well-known, and we were guided there by an app, but it's still nice to stumble across something that feels off the beaten path, even if it's not in reality).

The Calvary, Saint Paul's church

The inside, beautifully bright in contrast to the somewhat eerie statues outside, is also filled with treasures from paintings to elaborate wooden carvings. I must confess I missed most of the famous paintings by the likes of Jordaens, Van Dyke and Rubens, but I'd really like to go back again anyway, so perhaps I'll get another chance to see them.

Interior of Saint Paul's

Carved wooden confessionals

Me and some ghost monks

Based on our quick flip through the app, there was plenty we missed in Antwerp, such as the Diamond and Fashion Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Rubens' house and the church where he was buried, and lots more. And as our day there attested, it's a fun place just to wander around and get your shop on. I'll definitely head back some time!

Apart from a trip to Ghent with my sister (blog post pending), our other main daytrip was to the Belgian coast, Knokke to be exact. First things first, it's really hard to park in Knokke. Having hit a bit of traffic on the motorway on our way there, followed by having to circle and then queue for a park, I was kind of dying for the loo by the time we got to the waterfront, which largely determined our choice of restaurant. Leaving Jules to find a seat on the terrace, I charged off into the restaurant and asked a waitress where the bathroom was. "In the tourist office", was the reply. I impatiently explained I was dining there, fighting the urge to knock her over on the the way to the loo, but I made it thankfully. And turns out, our lunch was actually nice. Of course, we sampled the (hopefully) local seafood - grey shrimp croquettes, which seem to be a bit of a Belgian delicacy, followed by a fish soup and a chocolate moelleux for dessert, miam miam!

Lunch was pretty leisurely, lasting about two hours or so, so it was mid-afternoon by the time we finally hit the beach. I would say it's been so long since I've been, but I keep forgetting that I did go in Majorca, so although infrequent, it's not actually been that long. I was surprised really by the fine, golden sand on offer. I suppose if you'd asked me, I would have pictured pebbly or shelly beaches in Belgium for some reason. Perhaps not so surprising was the constant gusts of wind tearing along the beach from West to East (or thereabouts). The temperatures weren't that high, and although it was pleasant when the sun was shining, any time it went behind a cloud (which was often) we were shivering. Suddenly it made sense why many people hired beach huts and why the sound of the ocean was frequently drowned out by people hammering windbreaks into the sand (seriously, a Belgian beach is about as peaceful as a construction site). There was also some guy with the deepest, growliest voice playing some sort of beach tennis behind us. We were giggling at the idea that he was a troll playing for the right to eat his opponent, but you probably had to be there. The match finished without anyone getting eaten, as far as I could tell.

Jules on the beach at Knokke

Beach selfie #nomakeupselfie

What's a day at the beach without icecream? I had gianduja (yum), limoncello (yum) and watermelon (too sweet) from an extremely popular icecream shop with an array of very exotic flavours - I tried to pick three I hadn't had before, but was spoilt for choice and changed my mind ten times even within those parameters

And a pretty bench

So that was our trip to the coast. I think Namur is on the to-do list, Jules would like to go to Bruges and I'd quite like to go back to Liège, since last time was mainly just running back and forth to the Spa Grand Prix (this weekend, yay), and we have trips to the French Côte d'Opale and Aachen, in Germany, on the books, so lots to look forward to!