As my loyal readers (both of you!) may have guessed, I’m currently in Brussels. I can’t tell you how many people from back home have emailed me in the last couple of days saying, “Anna Jane, how many pay phones have you seen in Brussels?” I can’t tell you…because no one has. But, if someone had, I would’ve said:
“None! I’ve seen zero pay phones in Brussels in the last 42 hours. Not a single one. But, I just went on a day trip to Brugge and I saw two! One was even in a BOOTH! And had a WHITE PAGES in it! An obsolete trifecta!”
I’m actually in Brussels with my mother. She doesn’t like that there are so many stores and fast food restaurants here that we have back home—“We’ve lost any sense of going to a new place,” she says. To be fair, we might be seeing a lot of chain stores because we’ve been going to rather touristy places, like Brugge. She really wants to go to such places but then gets annoyed that we’re not getting an authentic experience of the place because so many other tourists have shown up as well. I find myself rolling my eyes a lot (I try to do it with my eyes closed—don’t want to hurt her feelings).
She, however, is quite tolerant about traveling with someone who insisted on posing inside a phone booth when there was a perfectly lovely cathedral and canal five-feet away.
