Reflection: Flying Oranges
Giddily flailing my arms back and forth over my head, I shouted above the hum of the crowd, hoping that I would be noticed by the jingling Oopma Loompa’s just a few short feet from me. Oopma Loompas? Yes. Well, sort of. I’ll get into that in a second. The most important part of this story is that five seconds later, there was a perfectly round orange flying directly towards my face at an alarmingly fast rate. As soon as I dodged it, there were five more soaring straight at me, ready to bruise my arms at whatever chance they received.
To back track, I was resting on the cool steps of a random stoop in the middle of Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium. I was (quite hungrily) people watching, tracing my eyes back and forth with the rhythm of shuffling feet at the busy intersection. Families swung their oversized paper bags bursting at the seams with boxes of assorted exotic chocolates, while other tourists fiddled with their cameras attempting to adjust their shutters perfectly enough so that they could capture the dusk slowly draping its lingering arms over the square. My eyes had just begun glazing over when I was jolted out of my hazy stupor to the blaring symphony of street drums and tambourines echoing in rings around my ears.
Quickly identifying the source of the commotion, my eyes were greeted with quite a generous group of men parading around right below me, who were dressed in flaringly orange and green suits, studded in glistening silver bells from head to toe, and bobbing oversized hats decorated in pearly white feathers on their heads. Although at first confused, I soon realized that these men weren’t just here to clang their instruments on the streets, they were there to interact with everyone around them. I watched as a couple of them posed with tourists, another one ran around talking to strangers, and the last one took a beer from a random man and sucked all of the alcohol out of the glass bottle before returning it to the bewildered pedestrian. And that’s when it hit me.
Literally. I was hit in the side of the ribs after an orange was fired straight at me. Startled, I whipped my head up to see where it had even come from, when I finally caught sight of one of these odd men tossing oranges out into the mass of people that started pouring in all around them. Squealing with glee, I started raking up the oranges that rolled into my feet. As streaks of orange whizzed across the sky, my bounty of fruit exponentially grew in size, until oranges started escaping my clutches and had started to land on the ground with indignant thuds.
After conducting some stealthy detective work (Internet browsing), I was finally able to discover what had just happened to me in that square. Turns out, Brussels is one of the best cities to visit during Mardi Gras, and these men dressed as “Gilles” throw oranges into crowds to wish them, in a nutshell, luck. Supposedly, it’s a highly esteemed position, to be one of the Gilles, and to adorn such attire is an honor men strive to accomplish. Let’s hope that I’ll be blessed with extra luck, considering all of the oranges I managed to pocket, as well as all of the circular purple welts that will now dot my arms for a week. One can hope.
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