In the summer of 2009 Luciana and I spent three weeks traveling to Belgium, Paris and Italy. On the trip I shot ten hours of video (an insane amount) that I later edited into one, hour-long video. So that we can share the video with more of you, I have cut the video into six sections and, over the next several days, will upload them to this blog and send them along with excerpts from the journal I kept. I hope you enjoy them. JH
June 24, 2009.
The plane to Belgium boarded an hour late. When we were finally in our seats Lu made a jetting motion with her hand and said that she hoped the pilots, “Really passed the gas.”
I bit the inside of my cheek.
“What?” she said, and made the jetting motion again. “You know. Press on the gas.”
“Stomp on the gas.”
“Yes! That’s it. ‘Stomp on the gas.’ …What? Why are you laughing?”
I was reading when Lu turned to me and being careful to whisper said, “Dis guy in front of us has a comb-over. Does this mean that he cannot swim?”
Brussels, Belgium
At the café in the Grand Place having a coffee. It is late, after 9PM, but the sun has barely begun to set. The square is crowded but the atmosphere is relaxed and pleasant. Lu wants to take a picture of lights in the surrounding buildings when they come on after dark. I think we are here for the night.
Our bed and breakfast is a tiny slip of a place just two blocks away. From the street it looks like a storefront, like maybe it was once an art gallery, boutique or something. The owner, Faldo, wasn’t there when we arrived and we couldn’t get in. Lu called him on his cell and a few minutes later he and a young guy in a muscle tee jumped out of a cab. They looked like they had just come from a rave.
Inside the tiny foyer, the guy in the tee sauntered behind the desk, which doubled as a breakfast counter and bar, and pretended to work. He half-heartedly wiped down the counter and then tried to make a pot of coffee. He didn’t know where anything was kept and he didn't care. Were we being checked-in to someone else’s hotel?
After we were “checked in”, Faldo eyed our luggage, grabbed the smallest bag, then turned and bounded up the world’s most narrow and vertical flight of stairs. Lu followed after and I took up the rear carrying our biggest suitcase out in front of me like an obese, quadriplegic child. I looked to Fake Employee to grab the other two bags and he looked away pretending not to see. But he did it in this bitchy little way that let me know he knew that I knew. I reminded myself that douche was a French word and that if I called him one chances were good that he would understand. But then I thought that if he responded in French, Flemish, Dutch, French…well, any language but English, I would be sunk. I shouldered the other two bags and told myself to let it go.
As I carefully made my way up the north face of Everest with my retarded child in my arms, the flight-induced fugue state I was in sent a part of me back to the seventh grade when on a field trip to the South Street Seaport we visited a replica of one of Columbus’s three ships that was tied up at the dock. Even then, when I was myself a child, I remember walking up the narrow stairs from below deck and thinking that the boat seemed to have been built for children. It was hard to imagine it sailing across the Atlantic. Our diet in America has made us giants.
The café is closing. The waiter said that the lights don’t come on at this time of year because it never gets dark enough. Now you tell me. Lu was disappointed so I told her that I would buy her a postcard of the lights tomorrow. No one will be the wiser. Lu rolled her eyes and said that she wanted a waffle for breakfast.
The next morning while checking out, a photo of Michael Jackson came on the little television above the bar with a banner that said, “Le morte de Michael Jackson.”
“Must mean his new show stinks,” I said.
Faldo shook a finger at me and then pantomimed someone having a heart attack. “Ee's dead.”
In the cab to the train station Lu and I were both stunned. Such a tragic life. “We will always know where we were,” said Lu.
No comments:
Post a Comment