Day 7 - Namur

 

Hotel Wifi (48 hours) €8
Dinner - Pizza (3 people) €25
Laundry (3 people) €10
Candy & water €10
Circus performance €12
Beer at circus €13

 

The hotel people are super friendly and help us find a laundromat, wifi, and so on. We head down the hill to do laundry -- without tons of luggage, finally! (Just backpacks of clothes to clean.) A pizza restaurant next to the laundromat is perfect, exactly what we wanted.

Getting back to the hotel, we admit to ourselves that we should maybe plan a little better, so we extend our stay to 2 nights at Chateau de Namur (which will actually account for 3 nights' sleep), as well as hostels in Brussels and Bruges. Once the planning is done, it's circus time! By the time we go down there, it's 10pm; the circus is mostly over for the day. But there is one more show: "Time of Mothers." All I can glean is that it's Polish. What the hell. We get tickets and go into the performance area. There is a small enclosed stage on one side, and risers on the other, but everyone is sort of standing around in a kind of cordoned off arena because they tell you not to go on the risers. As the show starts there are maybe 30 or 40 people in the audience. There's lots of eerie music, no actual words, but people are acting roles. It is a very abstract play, with lots of imagery and stage tricks. To give you an example, a vehicle rolls out of one corner of the arena. Spotlights focus on it and there is a woman doing laundry, wringing water out of white button-down men's shirts. The vehicle slowly rolls through the audience, and people sort of skitter out of the way. The woman is becoming more and more agitated, she is wailing, and is now violently and repeatedly whipping the shirt onto the railing with a loud thwack, splattering the nearby audience members with water as she does so. The music rises to a crescendo. Suddenly the vehicle goes black, and the stage is now lit, but there's fog rolling out of it and faint figures making crazy motions behind the fog. Et cetera. There was a bit of nudity, but nothing unexpected from Europeans.

The plot of the play / show / whatever was basically inscrutable. I don't know if it was a cultural issue. I got almost nothing out of it, except that mothers were sad because their sons were going to war. And I'm not even sure about the war part. But it was cool nonetheless! They used a lot of neat stage technology to play tricks with projectors, fog, risers and so on. It was about an hour and at the end of it we were all like, WTF.

Afterwards there was a circusy celebration in a tent with live music and beer. The beer was provided by Dupont, which is one of my favorite breweries; they had Saison Dupont Bio (Organic), as well as some kind of spiced blond ale which we really liked, and Moinette. The live band was fun too; we watched the attractive female lead fail to pull a resisting audience member into the dance, and we resolved never to be that guy. Back to the hotel to crash.

 

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