Reflections by an old crank on music festivals

In a word: don’t go to music festivals in Benelux.

It’s not that they’re terrible or badly done. More about that later. But it’s just that everyone is so damned tall. At 6’2”, I’ve long lived with my own height disadvantages. Always too lengthy for buses, low doors, airplanes, and so on. At least I could see things. But the Flemish and Dutch are truly long-stalked people, evolutionarily shaped by living in ultra-narrow row homes.

Werchter Boutique was my first festival experience in Belgium. And simultaneously I’m convinced that I’m too short, too stingy, and too old to really appreciate the atmosphere.

The festival grounds are great. The place is truly made for a festival. Not the slapdash field setups I’m used to growing up in Tulsa, OK or living in Tbilisi, Georgia. This place was a permanent location, with boxcars stretching out in a misshapen crescent cookie of overpriced nachos, dried-out hot dogs, and lumpias. Seriously, 14 euros for a shawarma?

The festival grounds

It was a good thing we had grabbed a hot dog at the truck before entering. Even though the hot dog were terrible. I was trying to figure out why it was so dry and tasteless for quite some time, and later I saw a sign saying "baked hot dogs". Yeah, baked. That explains that. Nothing to dry out any beauty of heart-clogging Americana like an oven.

Europe is strange like that. It's a checkers board of sausages. One country has amazing ones, the next one bakes them. The next one they melt in your mouth. And so on. If you judge countries by sausages... well, I'm not sure where that would land you, except with a nice map of sausages and a residence in Krakow.

So, them tall folks...

Can blame them for that. But it seemed to closer we got to the stage, the worse our viewpoint grew. Damnit, I was the one that was supposed to be blocking everyone else's view! It was like the ultimate revenge of all the midgets I've stood in front of combined into one nightmarish vertical.

So then the answer was to step back for Gorillaz, the last band to play. Back and back and back, until finally we had a clear view of the stage. That miniscule, tiny ass stage smaller than a tardigrade on vacation on the Moon.

On the plus side...

Both Stromae and Gorillaz were out peddling some new material.

Stromae’s techniks were really cool: a huge screen that broke up into 8 pieces and moved around with the help of these giant mechanical arms.

Stromae's funky cool stage

Gorillaz’s techniks were nothing extraordinary. Just a huge screen showing off their signature anime, with occasional shots to the vast array of musicians that scattered the stage. Seriously, they tour with an entire hip-hop orchestra. What was extraordinary was frontman Damon Albarn’s practical juggling of musical instruments as he transitioned from one melody to the next. A real whirlwind of a singer.

Festivals no more

But therein lies my boot with both acts. They were perfectly performed. Perfectly staged. And I think I’ll forever prefer more intimate shows, where you can see the musicians’ sweat pour down from their foreheads, the grimace they make as they saunter through a wrong note hoping that nobody noticed. But well, you’ll never get that with professionals anyway.

All these are just excuses. I'm mostly just bitter over that 14 euro sammy and 7 euro beer. Ungh, eff that!

Christmastime in Antwerp

I’ll be honest. Antwerp was a surprising city. For some reason I was expecting a hyper-modern harbor city. Which in some ways it is, but its historic center is well-preserved, beautiful, and teeming with life.

It’s our first Christmas in Brussels and appropriately it’s time to see the sights. With the covidpass now being implemented in most restaurants across the country and Belgium maintaining a fairly high vaccination rate, it meant that life was beginning to resume somewhat to normal. Except the masking everywhere part, which I guess is the new norm. Whatever. At least you can’t sneeze on my tomatoes at the store while wearing a mask, you dirty bastards.

A short history

Antwerp is the largest city in Flanders, and is actually the largest city in Belgium if you don’t could metropolitan areas. For those not familiar with the regions of Belgium, you can wait for my upcoming blog on why not all Belgian beer tastes of sweet ambrosia.

Antwerp IS a gigantic port. One of the top 20 in the world. It’s tough to be a big port when you’re situated right next to a few other big ass ports, like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and so on. Northern Europe is good at shipping, what can I say.

Christmas tree in front of Christmas 8 euro entry Church

As such, they’ve got a thriving bar life and a well-regulated prostitution sector. Fun city.

The name comes from Dutch for “hand throwing”, which was quite a literal tag: A giant used to live there (imagine, even a giant to Flemish/Dutch people!) and used to demand a hand to allow people to cross the river. The giant then tossed the hand in the river for who knows what purpose. Today, they have a very efficient ferry system that does not require paying a hand to use.

Antwerp was a pre-Roman thing. Been around for a while. By the 16th century it was a thriving metropolis and took over the status as the main trading city from Bruges when people finally realized you can’t really sail to Bruges (more on that in a future blog). Antwerp made real bank in the colonial period, when blood diamonds and blood sugar (that is, sugar from slaves) became a thing and started to flood Europe through the port.

Our Lady of Antwerp's belltower has a creepy presence across the city

Antwerp, like the rest of Belgium, was constantly bouncing around from one occupant to another. Those who ruled the city—a cabal of globalist bankers—knew that trade worked best when the least questions were asked and as such they were welcoming to everyone. At the same time of the city's rise, the Inquisition was also rearing up in Spain and Antwerp became a haven for the Jewish diaspora running from the questions of brutal religious torturers. Because of this, Antwerp was quickly the center of Europe’s Jewish population. And so it goes.

Eventually, the Protestant Reformation came around and somehow the Protestants had trade figured out better than the Catholics (pro tip: usury actually gets money onto the market; this was one of the major Protestant reforms). So out with Antwerp, in with Amsterdam! Antwerp’s last moment to shine was when they were liberated by the Allies in WWII and served as the main point of import for Allied weaponry after their liberation. They got massively bombed by the Germans, so much of the old city has been extensively rebuilt, but their eye for architecture seems keen to keep old elements united with the new.

Fast forward, now Antwerpers are trying to pass themselves off as a fashion hub. Are they? I don’t know. I was there for a not-so-cold covid-cancelled Christmas. They’ve got good food though.

Dutch Christmas invasion

The Netherlands canceled their entire Christmas of 2021, going under a full and complete lockdown for dubious reasons. This blog isn’t about that though. The effect of the lockdown was that hordes of Dutchmen flew over the border to the Nederlandish-speaking Belgian cities of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, packing in the restaurants and crowding the hotels, making a mockery of all the pandemic-control attempts the Dutch government tried.

Random night shots of the old town

The results of which were there being so much traffic for Antwerp, the police had to go out into the streets and force people to park the cars and use the trams. And Antwerp seems like a city that you should probably use a tram in anyway, as it’s definitely not optimized for car use. The entire city center has been renovated for pedestrians, and is quite beautiful because of it.

Lucky for us, we were there a day before that hazard hit.

Christmas during covid

Despite all the Dutchmen, Antwerp canceled their Christmas as well, just not in such a puritanical way. They just said no markets. Still there were pretty lights and even a skating rink. All the restaurants and bars were open, which meant people were still all packed inside, and now doubly so because of the situation in the Netherlands. Why not allow Christmas markets? Keep people outside for goodness sake!

They do use the covidpass quite diligently, which means you can at least be assured that the clientele are all vaccinated or have recovered from the covid within the last 6 months.

Random waterfront shots

Last thoughts and where to eat

I’m definitely heading back to Antwerp in better times (read: spring/summer when it’s raining less). It looks like a great city to explore, and our small one-night taste wasn’t really enough. On our endless search for seafood, we ate at Bia Mara. Hands down the best fish and chips (in and out of England) I’ve ever had. Very well-seasoned, with some outright adventurous flavors, including fried Spanish-style seabream and a tempura cod.

Some other things:

• They used to have some canals, like Bruges and Amsterdam, but they tiled them over and used them for sewers. Now you can tour some of them (and even in a boat!).

• Napoleon tried to expand the port and make Antwerp great again. But his ass was grassed at Waterloo before that could happen.

Off to Brussels

As some of you know, I’ve left my forever/mostofthetimehome of Tbilisi and moved to Brussels, as my wife got posted over there. Now I’m in limbo, trying to juggle the boy, finding a nursery for him, and dreaming about returning to work and being productive once more. For now though, living in an Airbnb in a mess of boxes and plastic bottles and sitting in a broken office chair, it’s hard to get back in the productive mood.

The flight over was weirdly smooth. The biggest problems strangely were leaving Georgia. Our first issue was the decision to bring 13 bags to the airport. We knew it'd be expensive, but not that expensive. I had looked up the price the night before and rather than cheerfully enjoying some Georgian wine, I spent the entire night packing, unpacking and weighing bags--and even after that mess, coming to realize when I unpacked in Brussels many suitcases were still packed with frivolous things.

One of many trollies

Lesson learnt: When moving abroad, always take that extra step of shipping your stuff in cargo. The main disadvantage though is that you expose your expensive items to customs, whereas carrying it with you means you're mostly immune from that (it's a personal, non-shipping item after all).

When the Georgian passport control lady (they are curiously all ladies) saw my last entry stamp (waaay over the legal limit of one year), she looked aghast, picked up the phone and made some calls. My wife and kid had already gone through, and I knew a long time had passed when my wife’s head came poking around the corner.

“Anything wrong?”

“No, no, they’re just having a chat,” I replied.

Erm, was something wrong? I realized the issue when she finally asked, “Do you have a residence here?”

“Yeah, here,” I gave her my card. Five more minutes passed. Finally she stamped my passport and waved me on through.

The baby in the air

I was mostly worried about my son Vato’s reaction to flying. I didn’t want to be the father of that baby. You know the one whose crying the entire trip, with projectile vomit and diahrrea, mixing in everybody’s bad time with shit and perfumed diaper smells. Lucky for us, the plane served as some kind of weird depressant. As soon as the air started pumping, he went right to sleep and missed the whole experience. We arrived in Istanbul and he started yawning awake.

The airport was manageable as well, except for the toy shop. I hate toy shops. And the prices of toys equally hate me. It was the only time we had to manage a screaming baby when we told him we could only buy one car, despite him holding six. I wanted to buy him no cars, but whatever. My original intent was to buy him the car, so bought one I did.

The next flight went with equal ease. Though he did wake up a bit to see what was going on and decided that sleeping was the better option. Fantastico. Though I agreed with him, I instead wasted my time watching some B-level film. It was such a good flick I forget what it was.

Why am I awake for this?!

Istanbul airport

It’s a new airport. A bigger one than Attaturk. It was clear Attaturk was suffering traffic intake difficulties simply from the fact that our plane never got a gate. We always went down into a bus and rode for 30 minutes to the airport.

I was thinking Istanbul Airport would be bigger. We landed at a gate! So exciting! And then we descended some stairs down into a bus and rode around for 30 minutes. Given the reduced traffic from Covid, that did not bode well for the airport.

The interior is fairly nice. There’s certainly a lot more seating area and cafes than Attaturk, but it already felt near capacity. Maybe there was a hidden terminal they were keeping closed during Covidtimes, who knows. Whatever, good luck to them.

Arriving in Brussels

This is where things got weird. It was too easy. We stamped our ways through and they didn’t even ask for a vaccine proof or the PCR test results at the passport control. We did get a text message and an email later asking us to take two tests: one on the first day and one on the seventh day. We were to quarantine until the first positive result. There were several testing sites at the airport, but as we were in a hurry to get to the airbnb and put our exhausted baby to bed, we made the mistake of not doing the easy, line-less, super convenient test right there.

For those arriving in Brussels, do the test at the airport.

The next day, we got up and went to the nearest testing center. Apparently during a respiratory pandemic, jogging is super popular in Belgium. There was a kind of massive festival going on at the site of the pop-up clinic. People were everywhere celebrating, music playing, general ambient cheer. Such a gleefest evidently closed down the testing center. Ungh. I would have loved to join in the fun with a beer and waffle if not for the fact we should be laying low and getting a test.

That meant we had to jump on the metro and get to the next testing center. Another first for the kiddo! The boy loves trains, so this was an easy one. We got down the escalator and right at the incoming metro train he just starting saying, “Wow, choochoo train!” I think he just kind of shut down with his own exuberance when we stepped onto said choochoo train. He settled down and didn’t make any fuss. All this calmness a very strange thing for such a typically hyperactive young boy.