The last part of our tour was Brussels, which we were only visiting for a day and a half. No big problem for me, since I’d already been there before as well, and it was great to visit it again. Brussels had been the last stop on my backpacking tour, and I really liked the city. It’s a strange mix of urban nastiness and old European beauty. The city on a whole is just gorgeous, but when you’re walking through it the atmosphere is so urban and chaotic. There are police sirens everywhere, homeless people all over the sidewalk, trash and dirt and graffiti—a city of contrasts, if you will. Even though it’s kinda small, it’s nevertheless a really interesting place, and I was excited to see it a second time and compare experiences. Plus I got to act as a secondary tour guide: a supplement to Mr. Steves. The whole time I kept on going, “Woah! I’ve totally been here!” and, “Guys, this place is just around the corner, trust me.” Brendan and Karl called it “The Andy Fry Nostalgia Tour of Brussels.”
This was also the first and only place on the tour that we scored a Couchsurfing host (for those unfamiliar with the website, you can find some info on it here). Since there are so many tourists in Europe it’s kinda hard to find a host, but after a protracted search we finally found one in Brussels. And I have to say, our host was probably one of the most…unique and interesting people I’ve ever met. Her name was Suki Jenkins, pronounced “Sooki” (no, I’m not lying, that’s actually her name). She was an American, born in Seattle, and had been living in Brussels for the past fifteen years. When we got to her place we started chatting and getting into her life story, and the thing just got better and better as we went along.
As I said, she was born and raised in Seattle, and spent the first part of her life living and working there right in the middle of the grunge scene in the 90’s. She’s spent her whole life working in the music industry, and got her start at Subpop Records. The first act she ever signed with her label? Nirvana. The second act? Sound Garden. AKA this lady is famous. We were floored. I spent a pretty large portion of my formative years listening to Nevermind on repeat in my CD player, and to be with someone who had, you know, given Nirvana their start was just insane. Something I wasn’t expecting out of this particular CS experience at all, which is half of the attraction of the thing. She also said she worked for a time at the Cowboy Café, which was one of the big bars in the Seattle grunge scene. She said she’d always serve Kurt Cobain free beers since he was broke all the time.
Her life story gets stranger after that. She said that higher up in the music industry things get really nasty and heartless—the upper echelons of the big labels are full of people in suits who are just in it for the money and don’t care about the music. So she decided to turn expat, and came out to Europe. I can’t remember exactly, but she’d spent time in Belgium, Germany and France working in varying capacities in different music scenes, finally settling in Brussels and starting her own music co-op: Music Brussels. She spoke four languages—English, German, French, and Dutch, and supposedly held something like four or five university degrees, although I’m not sure how much I believe that. At either rate, we had some very interesting conversation for those first few hours in her living room. You could tell the lady had partied pretty hard throughout all of that history too—she was only in her late 30’s/early 40’s, but her face told a different story.
Anyway, she had some business to take care of, so we excused ourselves for the afternoon. She invited us out to a concert her co-op was throwing later that night, so we wandered around the city for a while and met up with her later. Of course, this was no normal music venue. Apparently in the 20’s “tent shows” were all the rage. They were essentially touring music venues—the thing looked like an enormous circus tent, dark red and faded yellow, and the inside was all decked out with hardwood floors, tables, booths, a stage and a bar. I think this particular tent had started in Berlin at some point in its early history, and had been on the move ever since. Somehow Suki had managed to get in contact with a group that still maintains and uses one of these tents, and they set up camp in the square behind one of the big churches in Brussels.
The show was kinda small—a three-piece Belgian act was playing, and the audience was basically Suki’s friends and some other randoms. Suki’s posse was, of course, a bit eccentric—definitely a group of fringe characters hailing from all over Europe—but they were all friendly and really inviting, and showed us a great time. After the concert we went on a tour of all the smaller local bars in the city, and generally just had a great time.
The next day was the official end of our trip. We hadn’t been in Brussels long, but the week was up, and we all had different plans at the end of the week and different places we had to be, so we couldn’t stay in the city much longer than we did. We got up at a leisurely hour and hung around for a bit, said goodbye to Suki, hit the few remaining sights we hadn’t seen the day before, and headed off to the airport to fly back to Berlin. It marked the midway point of my own journey, and once we got to Berlin we said goodbye to Brendan, and I hung out with Karl and his girlfriend Kiersten at Kiersten’s place in Berlin, giving myself a bit of a layover before heading to my next destination.
All in all it was an incredible trip. I got to see some new places, revisit old ones and get a new perspective on them, and spend a lot of time with Karl and Brendan. The Wanderlust strikes me from time to time, especially after summer 2009. It comes in waves, harder at some times, lighter at others, and this was the first time since then that I’ve been able to travel for a long(ish) period of time on this continent since then. I spent my few days in Berlin just relishing in it, remembering back, finishing journal entries on the whole thing and just taking it easy after being on the move for a week straight. And I wasn’t even finished! I had Granada right around the corner, and the Fulbright conference after that.
Stay tuned for part four: Granada.
No comments:
Post a Comment