mechelen

Walking down a street in the city of Mechelen, I hardly saw the stores and shops open on Sunday. Along with this street, I found several famous, expensive apparel shops, like Hugo Boss, but closed. Only small-sized grocery stores, like a mini-GB (chain-store owned by Carrefour), were open, and these somehow seemed to prevent the street from being a part of the ghost town.

The street comes from in front of the train station of Mechelen, and when starting from there, I firstly found myself in the middle of the quasi-American, normal, or unusual, street. There were restaurants around there with a little bit big and colorful, but old and lost luster signboards. The buildings were not new, but not too old.

Until walking across the small canal in the city, and finding the top of the cathedral, I hardly realized from now on, I was going to the small parts of the medieval romance in this small city. The small canal was like a boarder between the new and the old, or 21th and 13, 14th.

As getting closer to the heart of the small city, I heard the tone of carillon coming from the cathedral. Amazingly, one of the songs was relatively new, "Yesterday", the Beatles number.

Here was Mechelen, Belgium.