No, I wasn't misbehaving and yes, it was 11.30pm.
You see, there was a huge gas leak - fire trucks and vans every where, blue lights flashing and my crippled man and I, standing in the cold dark night, wondering how we were going to get home.
We started walking. He was limping on his still damaged knee, while my left knee was complaining about the little black Italian leather boots I had worn to the 25 jaar Eugeen Van Mieghem Stichting Academische zitting.
The wine had been good.And I think I would have enjoyed all the speeches however ... there is a small lack of understanding Nederlands on my part.
I understood enough but would have liked more.
Understanding more was complicated by the fact that almost half of Professor Roland Baetens speech was in French.
I can say goodbye and thank you in French ...
The extracts from the musical were magical ... 'Portret van een verloren lente' needed no translation. I find that with theatre in other languages. One can follow these things.
Anyway, walking home through a dark Antwerpen night and I heard a stranger behind us. I turned and asked if he had a taxi number in his phone because we didn't.
Being from Antwerp meant that he replied in English, without missing a beat and gave us a taxi number.
We called and were rescued.
8 euro later and we were home.
Niet zo bad.
2 comments:
You know Di, I can relate to these experiences.
Walking around with a damaged limb, being thrown off a tram because of some unforeseen accident, it all sounds very familiar recently.
And like yourself, I carry a phone with way too many numbers, but not one I can use when I'm in need of a taxi. Must fix that asap.
And like yourself, I found myself in a situation (the opening of a Portuguese Samba bar) where most of the crowd spoke a language that I did not understand or was able to speak.
Fortunately, language issues are not my main problem, but I know how it feels.
I'm glad you both had a great evening.
I spent my day admiring the brand new "stad feest zaal", the glorious, overly decorated 1900 style Antwerp City Party center that was turned into an awesome shopping mall:
http://www.stadsfeestzaal.com
shows it all.
And I obviously couldn't resist the opening of the first Saturn mega store in Belgium: larger than Mediamarkt and much more impressive. With SD cards for 5 euro and pc mouses for free, the crowd trampled the red carpet ;-)
I've been thrown off de Lijn trams so many times, three with foreign guests. I guess this time there was a good reason, and the big fire ... okay, that was a good reason but I used to dread it because I would have no idea where I was. It didn't happen in Turkey as often as it has happened to me here.
As for the new stad feest zaal... I must check out the site you left. I was too scared of the red carpet trampling to go see it yesterday but some of the prices were tempting.
Did you see they had EOS Canon 350D's for 350 euro - but only for the first 80 people.
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