She Who Must Be Obeyed combated my cranky, jet-lagged self this weekend with a trip to the Brussels Auto Show. I really like cars, new and old, so SWMBO figured that it would be a good way to deal with me after a 9 hour time change and 14 hours on an airplane.
European car shows, as compared to their US counterparts, are different. There are a lot more car brands on display, most either lacking the market appeal or ability to meet the safety regulations in the US and so are not marketed there. So you get to see a lot of interesting brands. Obviously the French brands are big players Renault and Peugeot being dominant. You also see Skodas, Dacea, Seat, Abarth, and a host of other mostly small cars that few self-respecting Americans would take a second look at. By contrast, a really striking absence from the Brussels Auto Show were pick up trucks. You hardly ever see them here, but in a US show they make up a substantial part of what is on offer. This also extends to whole American brands. Ford had a medium sized display principally focused on the Fiesta and the new concept Ford Evos but Chevy/GM/Cadillac was a complete no-show.
As I covered in my last post, driving and parking here is a nightmare, not to mention fuel costs. Consequently, scooters and motorcycles are very popular alternatives. Fully a third of the auto show was dedicated to scooters and motorcycles in al of their forms. I frankly, had no idea there were so many manufacturers of scooters. I was familiar with Vespa and the kawasakis etc. but there are a huge number of other manufacturers from all over. Lambretta, Neco and a whole host that I cannot remember. On the motorcycle front, I think my favorite was the Triumph Steve McQueen edition. It looks great and is very old school.
Car shows wouldn't be car shows without the extreme high end. Lambos, Ferraris, Maserati Etc. were all represented. The Rolls Royce display really stood out however just because the cars are so large. By American standards, these are big cars, but when you spend all day looking at cars the size of a Mini or Fiat 500, they look positively enormous. One would assume that they are all rain forest and endangered species on the inside, but you need an invitation to get close to them, so obviously we were left outside the velvet rope. It seems positively ridiculous to me to show a car like that in this country. The roads are not wide enough, or good enough and the socialist leaning of the country would make you beyond conspicuous. You would truly need to be an enormous walking talking rectum to want one.
Finishing up with the luxury autos, we decided to leave the Expo and find some lunch. Back at our car, we experienced a typically Belgian parking situation. Parking is tight at the expo and we were wedged into a very small space. The result was that I had to inch forward and backward about 15-20 times in order to get out of my space. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it is not. Thankfully, my parking sensors have two tones so I could tell when I was less than 6 inches from impact on both ends. Most of the time however, they were both going off at once. Thank you BMW.
Returning to this blogs roots, I am reviewing a new and highly limited beer. The Charles Quint Ommegang Limited Edition Beer. Each year Charles Quint makes a special beer for the Ommegang Celebration. It is only available in Belgium and is a very small batch. Ours was bottle 498 out of 11,000. This is not to be confused with the beer produced by Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown New York. Charles Quint is a Belgian brewery with limited international exposure but a fairly large presence in Belgium and are a sponsor of the Ommegang festival. They give away a substantial amount of the beer as part of the celebration and as is typical, SWMBO won a 750 ml bottle. We received it over the holidays and I decided to give it a go this evening.
The Ommegang is a very pale golden beer. It is a bit more hoppy than a typical triple and less sweet, with some sourness and herbal notes. It is quite crisp and I think would be good as a summer beer. It is good, not great, but flavorful and interesting. Three Drunk Monks!
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