Belgium: Of Pretzels and Pilgrims

Hello!  I am writing from our apartment in Paris on our last night in Europe.  It feels pretty eerie after we've spent so much time here.  On the other hand, we just watched "Before Sunrise", which was quite a fitting end to our travels (and the background for the shots, both the trains and the city, were oddly reminiscent).

I'm getting ahead of myself here, though - we've still had a bunch of time in Europe that I haven't written about, and that I want to make sure I keep track of well enough to remember later.  This time I'd like to talk about our lovely time in Belgium.

During our time in Belgium, we had the privilege of staying with our friend from college, Anya, and her husband, Robert.  They recently moved to Belgium as Robert got a job with a company there working in nanotechnology.  Though he had to work most of the time we were there, we got some nice time with both of them.  Here is Anya, making a mustache out of a pretzel and drinking a gueuze.  Anya and Robert live in Leuven, a town a bit east of Belgium's capital city of Brussels, so this was a break from our trend of primarily visiting European capitals.  I have to say, it was really nice - we visited Brussels briefly (more on that later) and found we were happy to be going back to a smaller town at the end of the day.

One thing Anya showed us which turned out to be pretty interesting was the grocery store.  I think you can tell a lot about the eating habits of people from their grocery store, and this one was certainly no different.  Apart from the sort of stereotypical Belgian things like waffles and chocolates, Belgians have a raging love for mayonnaise.  Nearly all of the products in the picture to the left are different kinds of mayonnaise.  I hadn't heard about this before going - Belgians have whole stores devoted to specifically french fries with mayonnaise.  They also have other things you can buy that they will deep fry for you and put with mayonnaise, but really it's all about the french fries.

The selection of mayonnaise was eye-opening.

Another thing we were really excited for in Belgium was a bit of a pilgrimage for us to the St. Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren.  It's a tiny town almost at the western coast of Belgium, wholly made up of farms except for the abbey.  Doesn't sound like much of a tourist area, right?  Still, when you arrive in the nearby town of Poperinge, everyone knows exactly what you came for.


That's because the Westvleteren Brewery is known to have what has many times been hailed as the best beer in the world.

It's tough to get.  If you try to buy it in the USA, you'll pay outrageous prices.  But hey, if you're already in Belgium, then why not, right?

So we took the train out to Poperinge and rented bikes to ride off into the farmland.  Eventually we arrived at In de Vrede, the cafe next to the abbey that is the only place that actually serves the three different beers that these Trappist monks brew.




So of course the question is - how was it?  I think Tim and I could both easily see how it had been crowned as the "best beer in the world."

Interesting thought, also:  I'm sad they don't sell this where I can easily buy it, but I have to wonder just how much the rarity of the beer and how difficult it is to get contributes to it being so awesome.

We also got their beer cheese, by the way, which was delicious.

Afterward, on our bike back to Poperinge, we learned an important fact about the plants we had seen on our way out: they were hops.  I guess it makes sense for a world-renowned brewery to be surrounded by hops farms!

On our way back to Leuven, we made a stop in Brussels for Congolese food.  The city has a ton of African immigrants (thanks, colonialism) and we headed straight for the majority African neighborhood, Makonge, for our dinner.

And that was it for our pilgrimage.  We spent the rest of our time in Belgium relaxing with friends.  So, while we didn't have the quite the whirlwind feeling of some of our other destinations, we did have a wonderful, quiet few days with our waffles, chocolate, beer and friends.