Your Monthly Culture Fill with Ricky & Mill

by Ricky Maggioni and Milena Stoilova

Welcome to our monthly column on what’s culturally popping in and around Utrecht! We hope you’ll be amazed or amused, or maybe even both. In this month’s edition, we will not be focusing on Utrecht, instead moving to new dwellings, so let’s not dwell on the past.

Apologies for the awful puns. All jokes aside, this month’s special edition in relation to the collaboration with Scope dwells us on the concept of ‘dwelling’. In our column, we’ve decided to interpret this as a space which is of significance to someone because they spend/ have spent time there, whether alone or with friends, on a regular (or at least repeated) basis. In this month’s column, Milena and I have chosen to each individually discuss a dwelling of cultural significance in non-Dutch cities to which we have a connection.

Ricky: Before moving to Utrecht I lived in Brussels for nearly 11 years. After my decadelong stay in the Belgian capital, I consider two iconic places in the city to be true dwellings: the

Grand Place and the Parc du Cinquantenaire. The Grand Place is situated in the middle of Brussels - or as close to the ‘middle’ as you can get in a city that has no real center. The stoney square is surrounded by ornate, gold-laden buildings which hundreds of years ago would have served as merchants’ guilds, the town hall, and important meeting spots. I consider it a dwelling because it was the go-to meeting spots with friends for many Friday night escapades, pub crawls, or even daytime strolls. In other words, when I think of the Grand Place, I think of time spent with friends. On the other hand, the Parc du Cinquantenaire is not a place where I personally spent much time while in Brussels. Yet, I would be remiss not to mention it as it served the very same purpose for many others - a beautiful, scenic, meeting place - that the Grand Place served to me.

Milena: For me dwelling is more related to the zoom-out of everyday life and zoom-in to a familiar, nostalgic place. With that being said, when I think of dwelling, my mind dwells on my grandparents’ apartment in Bulgaria, in the middle of Sofia’s city center. I’ve spent many moments from my childhood there, either playing the piano with my grandma, running around with my barbie dolls or, most specially, staring from the window to the beautiful Alexander Nevski cathedral right in front of the apartment. A white church with vibrant shades of turquoise and gold fills my memories with nostalgia. When the weather was good, we would go out and walk in the park behind the cathedral. Nowadays, with my grandpa still living in the same old apartment many years later, I like to do the exact same thing; stand in front of the window looking at the beautiful cathedral and thinking back to the precious moments of my childhood.

This has been our brief, but hopefully slightly informative, take on the concept of dwelling! If you didn’t know about the places we mentioned, we highly recommend you save the names for a future trip as they’re definitely worth it.