It was Amber’s birthday weekend. We had already started off some excursions to celebrate that on Thursday and Friday, and we kept the momentum going. On Saturday, we went on the Brussels Book Trail, which ended in the most amazing surprise when I found my zines at Zig Zag Reading Room, the sixth and last shop on our route. Of the six participating bookshops, three were stores we haven’t visited before. It was fun going from bookshop to bookshop all day, talking to booksellers, and picking up books, postcards, and prints as we went along. On Sunday, we went to Maison Hannon (all the writing in their captions and descriptions was really insightful and incisive) and followed that up with lunch at Anjali. Amber had taken the next couple of days off and I took leave on Monday, so we got to enjoy a longer than usual weekend.
Work took a similar turn as the last week. I am struggling to get my part of type design done with the management and coordination tasks on my plate. Once again, I got the most done on Thursday, my no-meeting day. Later that day, I gave my talk for TDC, which, I thought, went pretty well. Aadarsh and I had a pretty productive work call on Friday morning.
Amber and I have fallen behind on our quest to see all the parks in Brussels, but we made up for lost time this past week. Between bookshop hopping, we visited Parc de la porte de Hal on Saturday. A more fruitful expedition was two days ago when we traveled east to Parc de la Héronnière and Parc Tercoigne. We took our proper camera for birdwatching for the first time in Brussels, and got some lovely pictures of mute swans, coots, and a lone grey heron. We also spotted a lifer: the song thrush. Our plan was to come back home after birdwatching and cook dinner, but we were tired and Belgium were playing Spain in the World Cup quarter-finals, so we decided to eat out and soak in the excitement for the match. Even though Belgium lost, that was invigorating to experience.