Antwerp and the first doner kebab of the trip

We had went to Antwerp really without any plan, our chess friend who loved architecture in Amsterdam had recommended it and Tyler and I had already been to Brussels so we figured we would give it a try. Antwerp turned out to be a pretty strange place. We arrived on a Sunday and for those who don't know Europe has this great and sometimes rather annoying habit of closing everything except restaurants on Sundays. When we first got there Ty and I had forgot it was Sunday and were under the impression that Antwerp was a ghost town as we walked through the business district looking for a hostel we had read about online. After arriving at the hostel and banging on it's locked door a Brazilian guy poked his head out and at first told us he was full but then asked us to come in, saying he would see what he could do. I'm still not sure if the building was actually open legally as a hostel or if this Brazilian guy had the keys and was squatting there. He didn't even know how many beds he had and we had to wait while he counted them again and again trying to figure out if he had space for 2 more. Eventually I think he tired of the math and just decided to say fuck it and we were told we had a place to stay. Later that night, rather unsurprisingly, our friends math had been wrong. We ended up having one more person than beds in our room and I had to go and sleep in a room we were told not to go into. Other than the relentless attack put up by the mosquitoes the other room worked out fine. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful and in the morning we headed to the train station to figure out our plans to Paris. After figuring our plans out we headed to the biggest park in town to kill a couple hours before the train. Tyler wanted desperately to sit down and I wanted to creep on old men playing chess in the park. We didn't find any old men with chess pieces grasped between sweaty fingers but we did find a skate park where we sat for quite a while and watched a very strange mix of people roll around, some on bikes others on razor scooters, most thankfully on skateboards. After a few hours we rolled out to the train station and on to Paris.