A Beautiful Window in Antwerp

This beautiful window is located at the end of Tram's 10 and 11, in Melkmarkt. 

I love it and stopped to photograph it today.  Later, editing it, I was bemused by the way there were almost no straight lines, beyond the window frames, on the ancient building that houses it.

The warmth of the window, the way the instruments are displayed, the light ... it all called to me so much more than the building itself and so I cropped the image down to the window. 

Autumn Scenes in Antwerp, Belgium

It's a grey and miserable autumn day here in the city and that was me, out the door and on the tram, on school run by 7.30am.  To complicate things, Wednesdays and Thursdays Miss 9 's school closes at midday so I get an hour or two at home before I'm back out and across the city to pick her up. 

Who knows why I imagined I could handle my red umbrella and my camera but I did.  I created a couple of montages - photographs taken as I wandered across Antwerp city.  A tram from the suburbs to the city centre, then a walk that wends its way through cobble-stoned backstreets and ancient buildings ...

4.30pm, it's still raining and we're losing the light fast.  It's not even winter yet.  But anyway, my adopted city ...

There's the tree-lined street ... that I don't live in.  The tram tracks curving off into the distance.  And the beautiful park I live near.  The one that often has a 'beautiful mist' softening the scenes there.  'Beautiful mist' because, pretty as it is, it is actually the horrendous pollution created by one of Europe's busiest highways just next-door there.

The next montage was made up of images I found in the city.  Antwerp is a city of painters.  Rubens also lived here and there are statues all over the place. 

Reflections, taken on the street I call the street of the antique shops.  I loved the soldiers and the wine glasses... I tried to capture them while including the street scene too.  It made what might have been a miserable day almost fun.

On Being Filmed

I'm sitting here at my computer, being filmed as I type ... telling the story of my life here in Antwerp.  How I arrived, what I like about it, and what is difficult.

It's quite odd.  I have relaxed far too much but my interviewer is lovely.  She's Belgian and (it's almost an of course) her English is far more English than mine.  I'm almost resigned to this happening though.  The Belgians seem only to need a small exposure to BBC English and they own it.  Meanwhile, New Zealanders spend their entire lives struggling out here in the world with their strangely pronounced vowel sounds.

It's Autumn ... grey and windy.  There's a walk in the park coming up and some more conversations.  Meanwhile, I've been processing some of the photographs of that previous trip to Italy

On Preferring Genova ...

A shameful admission ... perhaps, but I didn't fall in love with Verona. I don't know what I expected.  I may have accidentally watched Letters To Juliet once and you might say, that serves you right, Di. 

It was a very pretty movie set in an Italian summer.  Meanwhile I was there in September on an overcast day and I couldn't help noticing how much they had tidied things up for the movie.  And I think I was disappointed.

I really like Genova.  I like the extremes of Genova.  And it doesn't pretend to be anything it's not.  The gritty is there, right next to the pretty, in that northern Italian city located on the edge of the Ligurian Sea.

Trieste didn't seem to be pretending, not at all, during the few hours spent there.  And the local restaurant we found served food that I'm still dreaming about.  I love Rome but not like Genova.  Rome is simply something else.  Magnificent.

Acqui Terme has fabulous food and wine.  And the people were lovely but still, I preferred Genova.

Venice ... rainy, overcast, crowded.  I don't know, it didn't capture me but perhaps I need to go back there in summer, or spring.  On a sunny day anyway.  And Cinque Terre ... I'm still muttering about the crowds I found there.

Naples, that was something something else!  It was like nowhere I've ever been before.  Not like Istanbul, nor Cairo.  Not Singapore.  Naples was just its ownself.  I loved it but I imagine it's obvious by now ... not like I love Genova.

I write all of this in a bemused state of mind.  I need to pop in and visit Florence one day, and maybe drive through this Tuscan countryside everyone raves about.  Even if it only confirms what I suspect ... that Genova has everything, and more, of what I prefer.

Maybe Italy is like a pick-a-path story.  Maybe you simply find what you love best there and stay loyal to it.  I don't know but that's how it is for me.

Life Without Travel ...

The longer I'm home, the more domestic I become.  It's as if the examples laid down in my childhood just take over when I'm home too long ... ohdearlord!

The house is clean, the laundry mostly done.  There's gluten-free bread in the machine, tacos are ready to cook.  I imagine it might be the last lettuce and tomatoes I can stand to eat until next summer.  How and where do they grow these once the warm weather is done and autumn is absolutely in place? 

The tv people are coming to interview me tomorrow.  Let's see how that goes.  If it goes well, I'll share.  If not, I shall never mention it again.  It will be my third tv interview thingy and I'm hoping that I have finally learned how to self-censor.  Last time, a laughing producer said, 'Ohhhh, we had to murder some darlings!'  I was relieved that he did but concerned he was laughing.

Actually, that's over here.  They got our dates wrong.  I've been in Belgium since 2005 and Wendy, the artist, has been here for 3 years.  We had so much fun making that.  Mustn't relax tomorrow though ...

But it's a short piece and so the temptation to relax into a conversation with the interviewer may not occur in ways that make me forget the potential viewing audience.

It's getting cold ... 4 celsius this morning, rain fell most of the day.  My new book arrived.  I ordered wrong but it seems like a better starting point than Viktor e. Frankl's original 'Man's Search For Meaning'.  He expands on that book in this book.

I devoured it on the tram to the city this afternoon ... 'Existence thus may well be authentic even when it is unconscious, but man exists authentically only when he is not driven but, rather, responsible.  Authentic existence is present where a self is deciding for itself, but not where the id is driving it.'

Let's see how that unfolds over these days where I'm catching trams across the city 4 times per week.

I posted a photograph of my workspace the other day and then I decided to withdraw from my commitment to blog everyday.  I deleted the 3 posts I had written.  But then ... in a moment of brilliance, I deleted my Facebook account and voila, I am back blogging daily ... twice daily today it seems, and so I'll repost the photograph of my work space because I wouldn't mind seeing if time off from Facebook, combined with this promise to blog daily, and the fact I am beginning work on my book, doesn't inspire an evolution in my workspace over time.  I'll chart it here.  Then again, nothing may happen.

I'm struggling though.  I used to write the blog just for me now I'm more conscious of the fact I'm putting this space out there in the big new world called NaBloPoMo.  That's odd and I'm trying to get past the whole self-conscious thing.