Antwerpen

After hours, the city looks largely uniform in its Flemishness, represented by buildings both old and new. On that overcast afternoon, for a glorious couple of hours, Antwerp did become the city of my imagination. As I spied the old men sipping Sagres in Espigueiro, a corner bar in the heart of the Portuguese barrio in Sint-Jansplein, the sun peeked out and the city-within-a-city project of the immigrant didn't seem so misguided anymore. I might have been in Lisbon. Like all great cities of the world, there are more beginnings than ends here.