Part 5: Is this just fantasy?

a reception desk, an exchange of numbers and figures, an elevator, a wrong floor, a flight of stairs, a corridor, a last turn, and there it is, my room, waiting for me with ac, waiting for me with silence, with space, with softness. good to know it is here, good to know it will be there at the end of the evening, good to know i have a cool place to sleep. i drop my bags, i feel like taking a long cold shower and take a long soft nap before i go again but then i hear the world whispering outside, the night moving, the streets vibrating, as if the heat would have set them alive. temperatures are still in the thirties outside, at nine in the night, it feels like Spain, it feels like South France, it feels like moving, it seriously feels like moving, and so i just do the fastfood version of refreshing myself while my mind already is out and about again. i grab my bag and follow it, down down down and around the corner and out in the great wide open, out into the Boulevard that leads to the center of town, to the Grand Place, where two friends fo mine will be waiting, right in the middle of a place in the middle of this city in the middle of the capital of Belgium.

narrow streets, small shops, coloured houses, brick roads, peaks of churches, pillars of palaces, stairways to heaven, the Place de Martyrs, the Church of Saint Nicolas, and then the Grand Place, and grand it is, grand and elegant and majestic. i don't know where to look first, i hadn't expected anything like this, a circle of sights, a place of oldest history, memories of time engraved in monuments that are glowing in the night, glowing in golden light. it's great, it's overwhelming, and there is just one little thing wrong with it: in the middle of the Grand Place it isn't my friends who are waiting for me, but a stage with a complete classic orchestra on it, just about to begin with their show. a last minute mobile call gets me to the new place to be in just five minutes, just before the music sets in, just before any communication would be drowned in drum rolls. and with a drum roll the concert neither of us expected starts: with Helmut Lotti giving the classic version of the Bohemian Rhapsody in this more than mild summer night, with those words that ring so true, especially here and now: "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"

they don't feel real, this moments, but they feel great, and they just get better. some songs later the special guest of the evening enters the stage: Cliff Richard, here, at the Grand Place, singing songs about long roads that lead over mountains, singing songs about flying like a bird across the sky, singing songs about sailing stormy waters to be free.

Part 6: A skyline unfolding

this travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
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