A weekend away in the hills

Yes! Well! Now! That's it! The pentecostal weekend has come upon us, and it has become time to pack our bag. For a long weekend away, a trip out of the country and into the hills of Belgium. Throw the weekend bag wide open, dive into the cupboard and toss randomly useful things in there. Hiking shoes, old jeans, camera, check! Take a train down south, impatiently staring out of the window, bored with the pedestrian talk of people beside you. How slowly the landscape changes! But unmistakably, changes comes over it, the paperflat damned landscapes of the Northern Low Countries turning into the gentle waviness of their Southern counterparts.

You cross the border. Or at least, you think you do. Maybe you did so five minutes ago, maybe in two kilometres; what matters is that the Dutch urban regions change into troubled Belgian urban zones, where Flemands, Walloons, Morrocans, Congolese give it their slackest of efforts to live together on a few square metres, using all the instruments of cultural-religious-tribal-economic-in-short-political warfare that they can think of. Brussels is in sight!

The car stands waiting already. Your old friends are there, in general merriness everybody pats each other on the back, kisses cheeks, provides pokes between the ribs. The trunk swallows up all your luggages and off you go. Full speed over bumpy semi-highways, off to the east. There Stavelot, in the southern Liègian area awaits you. Stavelot, who has heard of it? That tiniest of Walloon villages sounding like Stavanger and Camelot at the same time? The weekend you will have there! You stop over at a supermarket on the way, kilometres away, to stock up some beers, some snacks, the general. And back in the car you jump, off shoots the car, you drive drive drive, and Stavelot comes in sight...