Let it shine, just one more time

 St. Martin's summer coming earlier due to the latitude? Veering winds? Gobal warming? Whatever, it was a great October day. 

On a busy working day, obviously. Just like a free ride when you've already paid.

Idyllic also the park and not crowded like in the "real" summer (note for the reader: real summer in Brussels = towards end July, after weeks of rain and 15 °C max, one afternoon the sky suddenly turns blue, the city starts smiling and despite the grass is still wet everyone feels compelled to go to the park and sit in the sun, possibly with some sun screen just to be safe - as if the sun up here would actually tan you)

A solitary nun, a few single parents with their babies, some teen-age couples on the grass, two secret lovers kissing in the shadow of a tree - too much passion to be legitimate.

And the leaves that kept falling.

Tomorrow it will already be -1 °C, soon there will be no more leaves and no more lovers in the park. 

Where will I be then? Maybe in a place where the sun shines. Just one more time

A bit short and dark they are

It must have something to do with getting older.

I am walking these streets with this complacent smile on my face, thinking: "Oh, how nice going back to a know place, a place enjoyed already some time ago, a place whose streets and shops feel vaguely familiar and at the same time, not quite so".


And memories come back all the way.
Memories of climbing the Bastion or walking along the beach with an already very ill but stubbornly fighting mum. Or memories of sweating all the way to the faculty building on a hot July day to talk for four full hours about competition law. And memories of that good restaurant close to the Tower of the Elephant which I discovered, by chance, with my friends.

Good, let's try to find again that great restaurant.

As tradition has it, as in the Old City in Jerusalem, as every time I go back to a place I think I know, once again I turn right instead of left when I am just few metres away and end up going in circles for an hour. Typical, no surprises here. Surprise was that "my" restaurant did not have on the menu that wonderful fish tartare any longer.

But a few new things added to my rucksack: fregola and Cannonau wine at restaurant Sa Piola, coffee at one of the terraces in Via Savoia, elevator up to the Bastion.

Yes, I am still here and already looking forward to the next teaching invitation.