Boombal

There is a new upcoming trend, and it's everywhere these days... and by everywhere, I mean all over Flanders, or it might just be all over Antwerp. Anyway, it's called "boombal", you could literary translate it as "treedance", but that would be wrong as boom in this case stands for the name of a suburb of Antwerp. (I was mistaken by the fact when I was first invited to go to one of them, asking "what the hell do they do on a boombal, do they dance around trees", which was absolutely not true... so again I embarrassed myself within five minutes, I seem to do that a lot :D) (Good thing it was a really loyal friend of mine (Jonathan) who invited me, and who has known me for 11 or 12 years now (damn, time is flying by) and he has seen me at my best and at my worst, so he's not holding it against me)

What it really is... a dance in two parts. The first part takes up to an hour where you get a dance initiation, covering the most common dancesteps. Afterwards folkmusicians will get the audience to dance. It has the image of a regular party with the exception that young as well as old people will dance together on live folk music.

Today I got a flier in the mailbox inviting us all to a real authentic Boombal, here in Lier, in the open air, on Zimmerplein, which is only a four minute walk from our home, on July 11th at 8p.m.. I won't drop a word to Jonathan though, otherwise we'll all have to go there and I don't think we'll be any good, dancing in the open air, in front of all the pubs... ;)