Europe 2023, August 21

My euro star train was booked for 8:15am, but the website said even for train travel you should to turn up 60 to 90 minutes before, so that meant yet another very early start. I got to the station in between that time rang and, pretty much nothing was open to buy food before the security check because of the time.

It only took about 15 minutes to get through to the waiting area, so this 90 minute warning was very excessive. There was only two trains waiting to go, one for Paris and one for Amsterdam (via Brussels) but the waiting area was already packed an hour before either was due to depart. Lucky I happened to be standing near the right platform when the train was announced, so was one of the first people on board.

It was a pretty boring train ride with not much to see going through France and Belgium, plus I was sitting in the aisle seat to further limit the view. I had to get out at Brussels and change trains, and didn't realise for a few minutes I was looking for another Amsterdam train on the board instead of Antwerp.

The train was nearly full when it arrived, it looked like it had been coming from Paris through to Amsterdam. I only had to go one more stop for 30 minutes to Antwerp Central.

I arrived into the grand central train station in the city centre, which looks a lot better than Southern Cross, then had a short walk to the hotel to arrive by 1pm. I planned to drop off some luggage again but they also had a room ready and overlooking the square as a bonus, the opposite side would have had no view at all.

I headed out to walk around the city for the afternoon just to get an idea of the surroundings, it was very bright with all the concrete and over 30 degrees, probably the hottest day of the trip. I grabbed some emergency euros from the ATM and made the rookie mistake of entering 50 so got a single bank note back from the machine, and just like UK money it didn't fit in my wallet properly.

Next I walked down one of the main shopping streets called Meir, there was people everywhere on an Monday early afternoon. Doing some initial rough calculations the prices seemed just slightly better than England in general.

I kept going a bit further west towards the river and into the older area of the city:

• Cathedral Of Our Lady - very tall cathedral
• Grote Markt - also known as Grand Market place, just an old square

Went a different way back to the hotel and got changed for running, down to Stadspark about 1 kilometre away. The lap was much shorter than I thought it was going to be, only 1.3 kilometres before I was back around at the start again. The outer footpath was slightly better at 1.5 kilometres but still had to do several laps before heading back to the Opera building across the road from the hotel.

A great surprise was having two BBC channels on TV so I could watch more of the world athletics championships, mostly short distance finals like 100 metres and 110 metres hurdles were on in the evening.