Musical Interludes

I know, I know… my blogging record of late has been atrocious. I’m not sure what has caused my lack of blogging mojo, but I just haven’t been up to my past standards. I’ll try to do better… I promise.

So, what have we been up to since we got back? Well, yesterday we made a trip to Spa. It was something we both needed desperately. Since coming back to Belgium, Andrew’s been thrown head first back into work. I’ve been dealing with trying to get our life back on track and organised and I’ve been attempting to catch up on things in photography land. Now that I have the digital camera I can say good-bye to slides (but will I, is the question…) but I still have a backlog of 14 rolls to scan, edit and upload to various places. At my current rate of progress, I should be done by early spring… *sigh* On the upside, I received a special order through Etsy over the weekend. It’s always exciting when somebody likes your work enough to ask for something special.

Yes, so back to Spa… The good news is they have recently improved our favourite relaxation spot. They’ve built a brand spanking new, not to mention huge, sauna and a beautiful new steam room especially for us colonial prudes who don’t enjoy getting an eyeful of wrinkled naked Belgians while we sweat. The bad news is they still haven’t done anything about the dismal food situation. When you go to a multi-million euro spa complex, with state of the art facilities, don’t you expect something more than a bland salad or a microwaved crepe?!? Oh well, everything else was perfection.

In other news, we have a very musical rest of the year ahead of us. We’ve decided to finally take full advantage of the fact that we live beside a huge international city, and start to go see some concerts. Other than seeing Anouk last year (still one of my favourite concerts ever) and the Gotan Project in the spring, we really haven’t been to up on the music scene. So, before our trip home to Canada, Andrew and I sat down and went through the upcoming concert listings around the country and picked some we thought we’d both enjoy.

While we were home, we managed to catch one of my favourite groups, Shaye, who were promoting their new album at the casino. It was a wonderful concert. It was very intimate, (only about 200 people at tables around the stage), and it felt like we were at a great party with friends. The women’s voices harmonise magically. This was the second time we’ve seen them live, and I would go again in a heartbeat.

 

Last weekend, we went to see another of our favourite artists – Norah Jones. This concert was a far cry from how we saw Shaye. Norah played to a sold out crowd in Brussels, at a huge concert stadium. While the show was fantastic, and her voice was unbelievable, the show lacked the back and forth banter and intimacy of a small show. I’m glad we went nonetheless.

The rest of the concerts we have planned are big names in big venues, but hopefully they will be fun as well. So, coming up in October, we go to see Gwen Stefani, then in November it’s Joss Stone. Finally, in December we’ll go to see Maroon 5. We also have the possibility of seeing local girl (local to NS that is) Feist in October as well, if I can still get tickets. Bring on the music!

So life is humming along here in little Everberg (sorry about the pun). Life is moving on around us. In fact that was the topic of my latest Expatica article.

I hope everything is moving along in your corner of the world too!