Last weekend I was thrilled to FINALLY be able again to do an in-person Meet-up. To celebrerate “5 Years Connect” Meet-ups are being held during the entire month of July, so that’s why I decided - kinda haphazardly - to set one up in the beautiful city of Antwerp. As I did not have a lot of time to prepare & promote the event, I did not expect loads of people to show up, especially since some local guides had already let me know that they would have loved to join, but were unfortunately otherwise engaged that day (due to insignificant details such as work or travels abroad - some people do have their priorities all wrong 
), and I turned out to be absolutely right about that, since in the end only one other local guide was able to make it.
But that definitely did not mean that we didn’t have a good time during the city walk, since it turned out to be - as we just started strolling the streets of Antwerp - a architecture-focused photo walk. This was largely due to the fact that Carol Bamps, the other local guide attending, has a background in architecture and is a passionate photographer. Since he is living in Antwerp, he was also able to show me some very nice photo opportunities, such as the graffiti (spelling out the city name in Dutch) you see in the cover picture of this post. In the picture below you can see a detail of the image and also a picture kindly taken by Carol, proving I was there (in fact I’m also on a 360 he posted during the walk and uploaded to Maps later).
While local guides in shopping streets often only have an eye for the strorefronts at ground level, this walk has taught me that it is often equally important to take a few steps back and admire the building as a whole, as you can see in this picture, taken at the Meir, the busiest shopping street of the city (2nd highest value on the Belgian edition of Monopoly after the Rue Neuve in Brussels).
One of the most famous people to ever have lived in Antwerp is the 17th century painter Rubens, who obviously has a statue prominently situated on one of the major squares of the city, where we took a break for enjoying a drink (damn – that reminds me: I still have to write that review, ah well, Maps will no doubt remind me a couple of times).
A nice thing about making a trip with a passionate photographer is that you start noticing interesting visual effects in places that you might otherwise just walk by. Just look below at the reflection of the building in the window of a store (as you can see from the fact that there is a handbag on sale at the bottom of the picture), which turns a rather uninteresting image (the building itself) into an interesting one.
And here you see Carol at work. I’ll try to convince him to write a recap post here too, so you can see the really nice visual effect he was capturing here.
To close off, here are some extra pictures I shot during the walk. Should you ever decide to visit Antwerp, make sure to let me know – it would be the perfect excuse for another Meet-up!
