What should I avoid in Antwerp?

The worst meals in Antwerp are served on the terraces around the Brabo fountain on Grote Markt: laminated photo menus in five languages, a waiter working the door, and a pot of mussels that tends to cost more than €30, often with fries that came frozen. Walk 15 minutes south to Het Zuid and the same Zeeland mussels arrive in a black enamel pot, steaming with celery and white wine, for noticeably less. Waffles work the same way. The stalls between Grote Markt and Groenplaats pile Brussels waffles under aerosol cream, but people in Antwerp buy a plain Liège waffle, dense and caramelised at the edges. For fries, Frituur No. 1 on Hoogstraat double-fries to order, and you can smell the hot fat half a block before you reach the queue. Ask for stoofvleessaus, the beer-braised beef gravy, instead of ketchup. The view of the cathedral spire from Grote Markt costs nothing, so drink one De Koninck on the square and then eat somewhere else.

Antwerpen-Centraal deserves the 10 minutes you'll spend staring up at its dome. The diamond windows along De Keyserlei and Appelmansstraat outside it are a poor place to shop on impulse, and touts on Pelikaanstraat sometimes steer visitors to a free "workshop tour" that ends at a sales counter. If you want a stone, ask for an HRD Antwerp, GIA or IGI certificate that matches the laser inscription on the girdle, and walk away from any price quoted without one. Pickpockets work the station escalators and the tram stops on Koningin Astridplein, and the Saturday afternoon crowds on the Meir are the second hotspot, so keep your phone in a front pocket on both. Antwerp scores 7.2/10 for solo-traveler safety (see the TTDI Solo-Safety Index), and that matches how the city feels, with little violent crime but steady petty theft. The Schipperskwartier, the small red-light grid around Verversrui, is fine to walk through, but point a camera at the windows there and you will get shouted at.

The low-emission zone is where most drivers run into trouble: it covers the city centre and Linkeroever, foreign-plated cars must be registered online before they enter, cameras read every plate, and the fine for an unregistered car starts at around €150. The smarter move is to leave the car at the Linkeroever P+R and take the tram in. On De Lijn trams, buy your ticket before you board, in the De Lijn app or at a machine, because inspectors on lines 2, 3 and 15 do check. From Brussels Airport, skip the taxi rank: a cab to Antwerp costs roughly €120 to €150, while the direct train reaches Antwerpen-Centraal in about 40 minutes for roughly €20 including the Diabolo airport supplement, which is about $22 at the October exchange rate. If you rent a Velo bike, watch the tram rails on Leopoldstraat and Nationalestraat. A wet rail can catch a narrow tyre in a second. On foot, stay out of the red-tarmac bike lanes, where cyclists come through fast and might ring once, if at all.

Monday is the wrong day for museums: Rubenshuis, Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) all close, so plan around it. The Rubenshuis has also been under restoration for several years, so check which rooms are open before you buy a ticket. If the view is your main reason to visit MAS, skip the admission: the escalators up to its rooftop panorama are free, and the wind off the Scheldt up there smells of diesel and river mud. The Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, begun in 1352, charges admission, and it's worth paying to see its four Rubens altarpieces, though avoid Sunday mornings, when services limit access. This week, stay off the Ring and away from the AFAS Dome in Merksem on Thursday 15 October, when Bryan Adams plays and the car parks stay jammed for an hour after the encore. Pack a rain shell. The temperature was 9.5°C this morning, at 91% humidity and a feels-like of 7°C, and that kind of damp cold gets through a cotton hoodie within 20 minutes on the quays.