The expression take a hike takes on a new meaning when I’m in this part of the world. Instead of being shooed out of some place where I’m unwanted, when I get asked to take a hike in the Hautes Fagnes region of eastern Belgium, I am truly being given a gift of nature. I’ve hiked through this huge ecological …
Knokke Het Zoute, Belgium
Is this what my life has come to? Have I become so obsessed with the hunt for H that my visits now only revolve around cities, no matter how large or obscure, where there are Hermès boutiques? I sure hope not! I’d prefer to think that my travels happen to cross paths with the random H store every once in …
Window Shopping In Antwerp
Antwerp is a port city consisting of a very diverse population of about half a million people. While most people identify Antwerp with diamonds and Rubens or Van Dyck, this quietly vibrant town is also emerging as a fashion capital in its own rights. Olivier Theyskens, Raf Simons, and Veronique Branquinho have each brought the Belgian aesthetics and sensibility to …
Road To Adoption, Part 3
You know how some days you feel like a turtle, carrying the whole world on your back while constantly at risk of accidentally flipping over with your feet flailing about in the air with a very long shot of anyone happening by to correct the situation? Weird analogy but I was definitely in turtle mode this past week. The stress …
La Saint-Feuillen 2012
Since its inception in the 1500s, every seven years the devoted folks around the Belgian city of Fosses-la-Ville would come together for the grand procession of Saint Feuillen. The march commemorates and re-enacts the townspeople’s procession in the year 656 to bring back to Fosses the remains of Foillan, an Irish monk who came to evangelize and found a monastery …