Brussels - 7th October

A leisurely coffee at Antwerp station then onto another efficient and comfortable train for our journey back to Brussels for Posies gig no.3.
Just before you reach Brussels Nord station there's a street you can see from the train, with window after window of hookers, standing around, feeling themselves up and smoking fags. Classy...

We got off the train at Brussels Central station and navigated our way to our hotel for the night, with a lot of help from the map in the guidebook leant to me by someone at work. Thank god I had that. Central Brussels is a maze of narrow cobbled streets. Cobbled streets look great, but they're a bugger when you have a suitcase on wheels. We eventually found our hotel, round the back of the beautiful St Catherines.

We checked in and headed up to our room. I walked through the room, to the window and said to Mark "Did I miss the bedroom?" Checked the only other door, it's the bathroom. Looked again - the "bed" was a fold-out sofa! What the hell?! And you even had to open it yourself. It was seriously uncomfortable, with metal and springs all around the edge. Thank god we were only spending one night. But at least we had internet access. Time to head out to the venue for the night, Botanique.

It was quite a long walk, but we found it ok and even bumped into Martine and Frank on the way. Yay!
Botanique (Botany) is a really lovely arts centre inside the old glasshouse of the Brussels botanic garden. What a beautiful place. Tropical plants and fish ponds all around.
There was some confusion over the guest list, as the woman said we weren't on it. We got it sorted eventually, then went and sat outside on the terrace for a while, overlooking the garden and the city. Lovely.

Gig time! Another great set, with a good selection of old and new songs.

The lighting was great, the sound was superb and the guys were in a good mood, obviously enjoying themselves. What more could you want? Apart from maybe a slightly livelier audience...  They really didn't seem to get the signature Posies humour between songs.
Mark was put in charge of Matt's video camera and disappeared to the back to get some footage. He never came back, but I stayed at the front and did some videos with my camera too. It turned out that the sound was SO GOOD at the back, Mark couldn't bring himself to move away once he found the sweet spot.
A particularly lovely version of The Beautiful One brought a tear to my eye.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNp5Up4LgfM

Once the show was over, Jon and Ken were once again mobbed by people thrusting cash at them in exchange for cd's, which they gladly thrust back at them, signed. We met Matilda (a multi-lingual Finnish woman living in Brussels) and her boyfriend Jill (?). Matilda was incredibly drunk and promptly fell down a short flight on stone steps. There's nothing quite like the sound of a floppy drunk body hitting solid ground. It happened so fast no-one could stop it. Before we knew what was happening, she was head-downwards on the steps, with her legs in the air, but she was shouting "I'm ok!" Thank god she didn't fall into one of the fish ponds!
There was a huge crowd at the merch desk, so Mark and I went and hung out on the terrace with Martine, Frank, Matilda, Jill and Darius. A hilarious conversation ensued, with subjects ranging from music to gynaecologists. Matilda was so frikkin funny. Normally I find drunk people annoying, but she was good natured and fun. She kept spilling her drinks, bumping into people and dropping her cigarettes. And BOY can that girl talk!!!!  :-)

Once everything was sorted, we all went to the hotel next door for some (VERY expensive) drinks in the bar with Jon, Ken, Matt & Darius, the rest of us and Jon's lovely friends from New Mexico (whose names I can't for the life of me remember). I ordered 2 glasses of wine and a Jamesons and it came to 21 euros. Ouch! 9 euros for a shot of Jamesons? - crikey, you can buy a bottle for that.
Matilda talked AT people a lot. Heehee. BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

We had a great chat with Matt and Jon - the first chance we'd had to actually talk properly, but everyone was tired, so eventually we left for the long walk back to our hotel across town. We walked with Martine and Frank back as far as the parking garage where they'd left their car. When we got there, the shutters were down and it looked very closed. Uh-oh... Thankfully it turned out they could get their car out and get home. Phew.
Walking back through Brussels was much nicer than Antwerp the night before. Unfortunately, we had to go back to our sofa-bed. I didn't sleep a wink, but when you're having this much fun, shit like that doesn't matter so much.