Panier

Would you join for a walk in park? 

Not unlike New York, Antwerp has a green lung of its own, if infinitely smaller. The Stadspark, the City Park, though modest in size, is not without its charms, a large swan-filled pond, a romantic suspended cast iron bridge and dollops of twisted fake rock formations.

These leafy stomping grounds were built mere decades after Belgium was founded in 1830, because citizens of a modern new nation couldn’t do without a spectacular bit of artificial nature to stroll and relax in. One thing I love about parks in general, and this one in particular, is that they are just about the only places where everyone simply mingles, from rich to poor, old and young, born and raised or brand new. 

Under the giant beech trees, they must be almost two hundred years old, I can see Indian families in cricket attire, loudly cheering a skinny boy darting underneath the canopy on a Sunday morning. The Indians came here in the early nineties to work in the thriving diamond workshops around the park, in the footsteps of the stately Hassids who arrived decades earlier from eastern Europe. See them walking in the shade, near the bridge, in their stark black breeches, knee high socks and dramatic overcoats, bent over strollers and prams, on their way to the sand box. 

Meanwhile, in the grass border that surrounds the pond, bearded and bespectacled fashion students sip their cold brews and munch on a Martino sandwich (a light and airy piccolo sandwich with américain preparé, raw minced meat, with pickles and a pungent anchovy sauce) on their lunch break, as Moroccan youths and pale forty somethings hang around the concrete structures of the skate park. I remember coming here with my mother in the time when we lived nearby, in a tiny house inside a Waldorf school for disabled children where she was a teacher. We would sit on a bench for hours on end, witnessing the gruesome mating rituals of the spectacularly coiffed Mandarin ducks. It was in the park that I realized that I was part of a community that was larger than the sheltered bubble I was brought up in.