Antwerp has 165 different cultures living within its city limits, and mostly we all do okay.
I love the vibrancy of the cultural mix ... riding the tram is like wandering the world. To me, this foreign creature who found herself living here ... being Belgian stands for so many things but on the good days it’s all about a this tribe of people who have a huge degree of tolerance and acceptance of the other.
It has been 7 years since I was last home, 7 years since I last saw so many people ... and now I have one of those long-ago people here at my house.
Valda was my first mother-in-law, mother to Chris - my first husband, grandmother to my daughter Jessica. I’m not sure if you can imagine how delightful it has been to catch up with her. This woman who has known me since I was 17 years old, something so rare in this life of mine. I had my daughter when I was 21, so not even she has known me so long and no one in my Istanbul life, nor my Belgian life, has either.
So we have spent the last few days catching up on extended family news, with Valda delighting in time spent with her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter too. It has been lovely.
But there this small thing that did make me giggle. The photograph below ... the glass kiwi. It’s a wine bottle stopper. An exquisite wine bottle stopper that Valda brought me from from home. And it shows me, even after all this time, Valda still does know me rather well.
