Browsing Through Brussels

Me, waiting to order my first coffee, am joined in my waiting by an English speaking man who clearly thinks himself quite the intellectual - the similarity only now strikes me.
He tries to slip in his word before me, but I am not to be daunted. I calmly yet assuredly order my beverage of choice.
The waiter nods, acknowledging my request, and turns to the other, still clearly out-of-sorts by my audacity mere seconds earlier.

Do you have a bottle of white wine. He asks. He is assured that they do.
As the waiter turns around to procure my coffee and the oddly ordered bottle of white, a second enquiry erupts from the - most assuredly not Anglo-Saxon - luscious lips of the aging gentleman besides me.

What kind of white. He asks.

The house white is a Chardonnay.

Disappointment.
We also have a more expensive white, though also a Chardonnay.
But I assure you that the house wine is really quite good.

The most expensive one.

Exit man to join a younger - though not by much - blonde woman in a - slightly too short - red dress.

--- Some time passes in which I realise the presence of 3 Swedish girls & engage one of them in a short conversation ---

A second bottle of white has been ordered and opened and the two have decadently consumed it with pain et fromage. The man has - rather obviously from where I was sitting, two tables away - started caressing the viciously long, slightly fleshy and rather too tanned legs of the red-dressed woman in front of him.
She is obviously delighted by his undoubtedly witty conversation (a "sexy shrimp" seems to feature quite heavily in one of his many anecdotes)(I hope to all that is right and just in this universe that this shrimp was not a thinly veiled metaphor for something else) and his exquisite taste in wine. Expensive. White.

Browsing Through Brussels

I encountered five Swedish-speaking persons. I cannot but find this a tad ominous.

The first two I met in a shop, where I, minutes later, decided to buy a low-necked t-shirt. Blue. A guy & a girl, alternating between - what I presume was - their native tongue and English. They did not purchase.

The last three I met in a bar, where I enjoyed my usual cup-a-coffee & a cigarette, plural. Unlike the couple, these three females where more obviously of the Nordic persuasion. Blue-eyed & blond, medium height.

Two of them left on what I fathomed was a cigarette errand, based on the fact that they had just run out of their little sticks of death. I could no longer restrain myself. I addressed the remaining one.

Amanda & her two friends were backpacking through Europe. She liked Brussels and had spent a week here yesteryear. I like Brussels too. The connection was immediate, completely imaginary and, as connections are so often want to be, fleeting.

Turns out my accent was quite good.