not in kansas anymore

Sigh. Carillons, pizzas, museums. How to say more than can be said? Damnit. I live a good life. Why can't I ever stop wanting more?

Again, "returning" to a familiar place (we visited Lier for an evening during EuroTour 2005) was preposterously heartwarming. I made the trek ostensibly to hear Iris' sister's jazz trio perform in a bar on the Grote Markt. Iris dished out the following scoop that knocked me flat. You know that middle-aged, mild-mannered, soft-spoken organ teacher of mine? He remarried just this year--with a 26-year-old former student, the lucky one out of several that he dated!

"It's possible," she responded to my amazement, as she often does, half seriously and half ironically and half (this half being in a higher spatial dimension) because her English vocab doesn't encompass a more specific phrase. And I suppose it isn't all that unusual in Europe. Eddy's girlfriend is a good twenty-something younger than him and a former student at the school. You're right, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore... although the coastal American's joke would be that such things only happen in states like KS or AL. Hell, the oldest guy I dated was European... and somebody else's teacher at Yale. One could certainly argue that a pattern is emerging. All the same, I'll be struggling to keep a straight face at my next organ lesson.

The last train to Mechelen never came, and the station workers directed us to Antwerpen Berchem, where none of the posted or electronic schedules showed any Brussels-bound trains. But my newfound Mechelen-bound friend Wem and I went to Antwerpen-Centraal and, to our great relief, found the 0:23 train waiting there. The best part was that it stopped in Berchem. Usually track 9, one of the workers told us. We spent the next half hour discussing cultural differences between the US and Belgium. It was nice to converse with someone new, since the young folks in Lier seemed to prefer chatting in Dutch.

The cock-and-balls-shaped sour gummies we bought and over which we cracked up endlessly during EuroTour must have been from the nachtwinkel near the station in Lier, because the store matched the one in my memory exactly, although I'd had the impression it was in another city. I went in to see if they still carried that particular line of gummies, but left disappointed. Did not get to eat cock on the way home.