Jack and I went to Antwerp last month. The express purpose was to see an exhibit of Flemish religious art from back in the day. We never made it to the museum, deciding instead to wander the streets gawking at stuff, as per usual. It was a really nice day and I just couldn't see us spending the time indoors shuffling from one painting to the next.

We had lunch at a restaurant that had rescued parts of Horta's Art Nouveau building Maison du Peuple, which was located in Brussels and torn down in the '60s to be replaced with an unremarkable office building. Other parts of the building have been incorporated into a tram stop in Brussels, and the rest is probably quietly rusting away somewhere.

Later we spent some time hanging out in the main square, where there's a statue/fountain of a guy who had just slain a giant. This has to do with the legend of the city's founding, as the young feller kills the giant, who has been making like difficult for the citizenry, and cuts off his hand. In the statue, the guy's in mid-toss, about to chuck the hand into the river. There's water spouting from the severed wrist. On the back side of the statue, where we sat, the giant lies dead at the feet of the hero. There is water spitting out of a variety of holes in the giant's body where he had received his mortal wounds. Wouldn't it be great if they took one of those staid statues of an unknown Civil War hero on his horse, bored a few holes in it in historically accurate locations, and hooked it up to the water supply? Instant notoriety.

After visiting some churches and drinking some beer, we were ready for dinner. The place we ended up was decent, but nothing exceptional. I had the eel in green sauce, which was not as good as the eel I had in Bruges. The highlight of the meal was undoubtedly when Jack excused himself to use the bathroom after finishing his dinner. I sat there looking into the middle distance for a moment, quietly enjoying thinking about nothing, when something caught my peripheral vision. Jack's napkin had unfurled from its crumpled position and caught on fire in the candle!

Turns out, nothing hushes a room more quickly than someone waving a flaming object. I whipped the burning napkin around in the space between tables as everyone turned to stare. ("Americans are so gauche, always needing to be the center of attention," I'm sure they were all whispering.) After a couple of flaps it was no longer actively alight but still smoldering, ready to burst back into flame as soon as I stopped, so I then proceeded to pound it on the table (on my paper placemat, naturally) to extinguish the glow. Everyone then turned back to their dining companions and the normal conversational hum resumed. The whole thing didn't last more than a few seconds, but I'm sure it was an evening's worth of entertainment in the repeated retelling for some. Who knew they'd get dinner AND a show?

The waiter came around to clear up the table, and I decided to play it cool thinking that there was a chance he wouldn't immediately toss me out for having allowed such a dangerous thing to occur. He noticed the burnt napkin and the black char marks on the placemat and said, "You had a little accident?" So I fessed up and apologized. He was very understanding and removed the offending articles. There was no evidence that anything amiss occurred by the time Jack returned to the table. I could be making this anecdote up--you'll never know.

On the train ride home, we got an upper berth so we could better watch the countryside fly by under cover of darkness. Jack was keeping an eye on two guys who were clearly plastered a few seats back from us. One of them kept speaking in a low, monotonous voice occasionally punctuated by loud gurgles. The whole thing seemed like an incident waiting to happen.

Sure enough, not long into our ride the more sober of the two came around to our seats hawking Liza Minnelli t-shirts from her 2006 tour (she had a show in Antwerp that evening). I declined to take one, and thankfully he moved on quickly without being insistent. As he went down the aisle, it became clear that he was giving them away for free. One person tried to give him some money and he seemed to indicate that the offer was breaking his heart. He ended up handing out about a dozen, including one to Jack. He was very sincere in his approach, and people began making a sport of it, asking for a second shirt or a different size to get a rise out of him. If I had been able to compose the sentence in French (we only had our Dutch dictionary with us, but everyone on the train was speaking French or, in the case of one elderly couple, Russian) I definitely would have asked everyone to hold up their shirt for a photo.