Brussels

from the diary: “Tuesday 10/25/88

“Tonight while wearing out my legs I came upon a tattoo parlor. Closed. But in the window a small black & white cat, its eyes wide, wide. I leaned down and held my fingers to the glass. The cat wiggled and pressed itself against the glass – whenever I took my hand away it stared up at me plaintively and mewed. So I held my fingers against the outside while the little cat rubbed itself back and forth against the inside of the window pane.”

On our Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam midterm trip Julie & I arrived in Brussels on Tuesday. “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium,” Julie said as we detrained at the station. This struck as us hilarious, probably because we were plumb wore out.

We left London Friday. Took the train to Dover and the ferry to Calais. When we arrived we sat on the train for an hour, there being a train strike. We were supposed to meet a friend of Julie’s homestay host at the Paris station, so we were anxious about missing her. She was still waiting when the train finally pulled in. She took us out to her house in a nearby town.

The next nights I stayed at a Paris youth hostel and we wandered Paris, together and separately. Visited the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower, Le Sacre Coeur, etc. Julie and I got on each other’s nerves, but, it seems, never quite fought.