I learned this word while taking a snack break during a fairly long and slightly lost route from the train station to the hotel in Antwerp: Bourgandiër. It has two meanings, a person from Burgundy, and also in slang, an epicure and bon vivant. A person who enjoys all the flavors that life has to offer; who desires to taste and experience the joys and dismays that come with it; someone who takes every opportunity to live to their fullest. There it was, summed up in a single word: my goal for existence.
13, Septembre 2023
It’s amazing to me that I can simply drop into another life. Step off a plane, onto a train, and into another world as if I’ve always been here. I’ve actually been daydreaming of this morning for weeks as the moment I’ll know when “I’ve arrivée”. Sitting at a sidewalk café, enjoying a café, and being an active participant in the street’s scene for that brief moment in time.
My memories are firing off one-by-one: the smell is there. Just barely on the tip of the breeze bringing me back to another first day in Belgium, over 20 years ago when I, as a young and naïve 16 year old girl, stepped out of an airport and into a country with red tile roofs and chocolate spread for baguettes. And there it was, that same smell made up of the trees and humidity and lives of all the Belgians in that small country- just the same- constant; as all old friends are.
Bikes with cheery bells and cautious cars travel in tandem down narrow cobblestone streets, their tires creating a steady bum-bum-bum-bum-bum rhythm as they move. I watch this world from my little bistro table on the sidewalk, and listen to the quiet cadence of morning routines. Birds singing, people greeting friends on the street, pups snuffling the ground on their morning walk, parents riding their kids to school on a jingling bike, hurried footsteps on stone as people walk to work. I am exhausted from travel, but eager to join them- I have no desire to be an outsider on this trip
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