Taking a Walk in Verdun Street

I’m never the one to voluntarily go pick up stuff, take long walks, or go shopping by myself (or with someone for that matter).

Which is why when I woke up today, I realized that I may have been just a little crazy when I decided to take a little walk and get some stuff done in the scorching heat.

That’s right I said it: I walked and walked and walked in a 30+ degrees Celsius heat.

And yet I think, it was the best hour or so of my post-graduation funk.

You see, I live about 10 minutes away from Verdun Street, which is known for its shops, cafes, and movie theaters. And since we’re all Harry Potter fans in the family, I decided to book the tickets early on as it was the movie’s first day of showing.

Harry Potter was well worth it

So I got dressed and hopped into a service, a shared taxi, letting my thoughts accompany me on this familiar journey.

When I got there, the box office was still closed, so I decided to do something that is so unlike me: I went into an adjacent store and I picked out clothes and I tried them, alone.

You see, at the moment, all the shops here are on sale, something which upcoming traveler me loves to take advantage of (especially that I need stuff adaptable to the not-so-sunny weather of Maastricht).

I wasn’t even looking for anything: just a decent pair of jeans to wear out in my year abroad. But even that proved to be a difficult task.

I’m no skinny girl, and I am proud of my food-loving fat, but the fashion world obviously hates people like me, because they vengefully introduced the horrible skinnyjeans, making me run in the other direction every time I see or even touch them.

Behold the attack of the skinny jeans! *Runs away screaming*

I mistakenly ended up trying one of them because the pair I picked out was mislabeled baggy. Let’s just say having to take them off, in a teeny-tiny dressing room, while I was all by myself was a near recipe for disaster. But it did pass and I continued on and rewarded myself with a new purse and jacket.

As for my enjoyable walk, well, I strolled down Verdun Street like I had done many, many times before, with family, friends, or former boyfriends, wondering and remembering (and carrying 3 very heavy shopping bags).

The little quiet café where I celebrated my 20^thbirthday with my best friend on a very rainy day (and discovered my love for chicken curry) and the Starbucks we always hung out at, the steps of the public school where I presented my baccalaureate exams and proclaimed to my anxious mother that I was done with math forever, the shops I hated so much but from where all my clothes came from, the little mall with the cinema I often frequented with friends and where I had my first dates- they were all there and they had changed, just like I did.

A view from Verdun Street on a normal day

Even the road leading to my house had changed greatly since the first time I walked this road. New buildings had taken the places of old ones, their inhabitants moving in and out and creating their own stories- and being a self-labeled writer, all I could do was think of what those stories might be.

I returned home, exhausted, my hair a billion times its normal size, my face red, and my arms slightly tanned, feeling a little happier than I had in a long time, thinking about how change is unstoppable and how well that would translate into a blog post about Beirut.