Flying Back to the US

At 36000 feet in coach class, a circumstance that I have been fortunate to have become unaccustomed to. It is not all that bad, She Who Must be Obeyed is a good travel companion and one who I do not get to travel with nearly enough.

While it would be altogether too easy to complain about holiday travelers. I won't. Although I am tempted. OK maybe just a little. I do not understand the attraction of those ridiculous document pouches that, mostly American, travelers wear. I particularly don't understand them on the guy wearing safari pants with far  too many pockets and zippers while wearing a photographer's vest. You cannot seriously need one more place to store your passport and boarding pass. Which also begs the question, why is it that so many travelers insist on kitting themselves out in all of the "travel"clothing for a trip to Europe? Do they will be asked to narrate a wilderness special for the BBC whilst strolling through the streets because they look like Richard Attenborough? I am no fashionista, but seriously, what is wrong with chinos or jeans and shoving your documents in your pocket?

This is the longest trip to the US that we have made since moving to Europe. I have been back several times in the past year for business.SWMBO, only a couple. We read all of the typical newspapers, follow CNN and log more than a few hours with ESPN America, the Daily Show, Colbert and South Park, so I don't think we are too out of touch. We also certainly spend too much time following the various Kardashians and those crazy toddlers in their tiaras.( Seriously, sometimes it is like you can feel the IQ points dropping.) Still, it will be interesting to get back into the swing of understanding everyone and not having to astulblieft or merci for almost three weeks.

Before that can happen, we have to clear customs, grab our bags, get the rental car and drive two hours North. Looks like it will be a long day.

Renewing the Residency

She Who Must Be Obeyed joined me for a session at the Gemeentehuis to renew our residency and get my Belgian and International driver's licenses. Technically, the Gemeentehuis staff are not supposed to speak to us in anything but Flemish, but our local group is pretty accomodating in that regard. We first took care of my licenses because we would have to wait for those to be completed. The woman who helped us with that was pretty strict about speaking Flemish but fortunately, SWMBO has been studying and has mad skilz. The functionary was pretty impressed with SWMBO's ability to interpret for me. (I didnt have the heart to point out that she had done the same thing a couple of weeks ago.)

Once the licenses were done, we did our residency card application. We need to renew each year when my company issues my new work permit, thereby proving that we are not derelicts who want to take advantage of the permissive welfare state of Belgium. The woman who helped us through this part is very nice. She was quite enthusiastic and supportive of SWMBO's Flemish skilz, which made SWMBO very happy. After about an hour, we had successfully renewed our residency and I am a permanently licensed Belgian driver with a temporary International license. By this time next year, I am sure that SWMBO will be doing a full on translation so that I can maintain my almost complete lack of Flemish. Alstublieft SWMBO!

Weekend in Paris

She who must be obeyed and I headed south to Paris for the weekend to celebrate a belated anniversary. Fourteen years has flown by. So much so, that if it wasn't for the wedding gift cross-stitch, we wouldn't realize how long it has been.

The goal of the weekend, besides the anniversary, was to have amazing food and to see Ralph Lauren's car collection at the Louvre. I will start with the food. Being someone who reads food blogs (I know, food nerd) I came across a review of Agape Substance on the Paris by Mouth blog. It was a recent review and glowed about the meal, so I thought I would take a flyer and try to get a reservation. I called the restaurant, left a message and got a fairly prompt reply back. (How un-Parisian!) Reservation secured, we were locked in for Saturday night at a super new 24 seat restaurant. After making the reservation I found out that the restaurant has only been open for about ten days and has been visited by several noted critics,all of whom loved it. So we were pretty excited to go.

Last night was the reservation and it started really well. They were very accommodating and friendly, attentive, but not overbearing. We started off with a couple of glasses of Champagne to celebrate our Anniversary. The chef then started to bring the courses. Agape Substance presents a menu but you do not get to pick from it,which I think may be a bit of a mistake. The chef selects ingredients and then assembles a menu for you at his choice, first checking if you have any food issues. The courses started off in amazing fashion. The food was over the top, bright and vibrant, and technically superb. Unfortunately, had I picked my own menu, a couple of items that wound up on the plates of the patrons on either side of us would have been my first choice. Namely the Chanterelles for me and the chocolate for SWMBO. Even so, the food was amazing. I think my favorite dish was pigeon livers in a fois gras emulsion. Needless to say, SWMBO probably would not agree with that, but surprisingly, she ate it. Although she did give me the pigeon livers and just ate the emulsion. Another surprise was the Oeuf. SWMBO likes her poached eggs cooked to the point of a rubber ball. These were approximately a 3 minute egg. Just poached enough to stay whole for a couple of minutes but not enough for a completely solid white. Shockingly, SWMBO ate that too, and liked it. I think it was the garlic sauce.

I do enjoy going to over the top restaurants like this on occasion. I appreciate the skill that goes into the dishes and the innovation that it requires. Agape Substance definitely hit the notes on those counts, but unfortunately they did miss on others. They misunderstood that SWMBO does not eat fish and that includes all fish, not just shellfish. Additionally, as the restaurant got busier, the quality control went down a bit. This impacted the later patrons more than us but was noticeable in that we are all sitting at one long table.

As creative and tasty as the food was, I cannot imagine eating a place like this more than a couple of times a year. After the meal, we talked more about a meal that we had at a Michelin two star restaurant in Luxembourg that was not nearly as fussy and far more laid back and enjoyable. This is the thing with molecular gastronomy, the biochemist in me marvels at the unique preparation but in the end, it is vibrant flavor with little substance. Give me a well roasted chicken and I am probably happier and certainly more satisfied. It was a nice experience, with some great wine, but only a couple of times a year.

Following up on the late night, we had a leisurely morning. Omelets in a small bistro followed by a walk around the Louvre. The Ralph Lauren car show at the Louvre was the real reason for the trip, besides spending time with my lovely bride (had to put that in) and it did not disappoint. The 1938 Bugatti Atlantic is probably one of the most singularly stunning cars that I have ever seen. It is probably crap to drive, but it is gorgeous to look at. Similarly, the 1930 Mercedes SSK was also a stunner. Both of the cars have beautiful flowing lines and tapered bodies and could never be made today. SWMBO liked the Porsche 550 Spyder. I have it on good authority that she would look "Super Cute" in it. The other two cars that I really liked were the 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa and the 1950 Jaguar XK120 Roadster. The Testa had a tapered body that presaged the form of modern F1 cars and just looked like it would make a wonderful noise. The Jag is just impossibly gorgeous and would make a fabulous cottage car (hint to the in-laws for a great 15th Anniversary Gift).

After drooling at cars we will never be able to afford, we wandered Paris a little more. coffee and tea at a cafe. A little sight seeing, etc. The nice thing about having been to Paris many times and living so close, we don't feel as though we have to take it all in at once. This is an incredible luxury, we know. It really makes visiting a city more pleasurable because there is no feeling of missing out. If we don't see something this trip, there is always the next. So our afternoon was essentially, finding quiet neighborhood bistro and sitting down for a leisurely two hour lunch, until we needed to catch a cab to the train station. The Bistro was in a quiet residential section of St. Germain De Pres in the 6th. The food was unfussy, tres correct, and delicious. We finished the meal by sharing a chocolate and hazelnut gateau that was simple and excellent. Proving again that good satisfying food is excellent in its own right.

A very nice weekend.

Ommegang...Ommagod!!

Belgians like nothing better than a big spectacle. Give them an excuse to parade around in tights while opera blasts from loudspeakers and animated movies are shown on the beautiful architecture, and they will take it. That is the only explanation for the events that we have been witness to since moving to Brussels. Every holiday celebration seems to be accompanied by live opera, costumes and cartoons. Which, to be clear, I am not complaining about. It is just interesting.

The most recent installment in this series of experiences was Ommegang. I won’t try to give the full history of the event. If you are interested, you can read about it here: http://ommegang.be/index2.php?idx=2&lg=en
In brief, the procession commemorates Charles Quint visiting Brussels from Ghent. What is now a 30 minute drive was apparently a big deal in the 16th century.

We went to the Ommegang festival with the American Club of Brussels. They had secured a dining room at Maison du Cygne, which overlooks the Grand Place. (As an interesting side bar. The first time that we went to eat here, a German couple of a certain age were taking provocative photos of the missus in leather and revealing bustier, while everyone ate lunch. C’est tres incroyable!). We had a cash bar plus a three-course dinner and wine. The group was a fairly interesting mix as it typically is when you pull together a combination of people who know one another and with a equal quantity of total strangers.

Through the course of the evening we mixed cocktail hour small talk with visits to the balcony to watch the proceedings. The festival itself lasted about three hours and was, as billed, a spectacle extraordinaire. The highlights of the festival are the stilt walkers. They walk around the Grand Place on some seriously high stilts. With the cobblestones of the Grand Place, She Who Must Be Obeyed has a hard enough time not twisting an ankle in high heels. The idea of walking around on twenty foot tall stilts is nuts.

Like a lot of experiences, this was an interesting one to see and worth the price of admission. Not sure we will do it again, but worth doing.

Nectar of the Gods

Sometimes separating hype from reality is difficult. The red velvet rope phenomenon is real and can be measured, so it tends to make me a bit of a cynic when I hear the “best in the world” tag applied to anything. As a commercially minded capitalist however, I can appreciate any slick piece of marketing that I encounter. Who would have thought it would be practiced by a bunch of monks?

Westvleteren 12 is an AWESOME beer. No doubt about it. When you do something for a few hundred years, you apparently get pretty good at it and the monks from Sint Sixtus are no exception. Still, there is a measure of Belgian absurdity to obtaining this nectar of the gods. The monks have gone Big Time and have embraced technology to keep their beer exclusive. They accept calls only within predefined windows of time that are published on their website. http://www.sintsixtus.be/eng/brouwerijactueel.htm

You then call and receive a busy signal for an indeterminate amount of time. For She Who Must Be Obeyed it was about an hour. They then take your order for whatever brand they are selling in that time window. The Blond, the Bruin 8 or the Holy Grail Bruin 12. The Bruin 12 has won best beer in the world several times. She Who Must Be Obeyed was calling for the Bruin 12. When you finally get through, they take your order for one case. Not Two. Not Three. One. You also agree not to resell the beer. They then ask for your license plate number for when you pick it up.

Pick up for us was about a two-hour drive through the Belgian countryside. We passed lots of farmland, poppy-filled Flanders Fields including Ypres, and a couple of windmills. The abbey of Sint Sixtus is at the end of an impossibly narrow, windy road, which deposits you at the abbey itself. Across the street is a little restaurant that acts as the Abbey’s visitor’s center. Here you can sample all three of the beers and purchase up to four bottles (2 Blond, 1 Bruin 8 and 1 Bruin12 with a glass). Good luck getting that through airport security. SWMBO and I stopped in the restaurant for a quick bio break and a not so quick lunch including a blond and a Bruin 8. Refreshed and ready to move on, we got back in the car and drove into the pick up line at the Abbey. Here you wait in your car for the monk to check your license plate number. If you pass muster, he rolls up with a fresh crate of 24 bottles to put in your trunk. You then pay and cannot purchase another case of beer until the following month. They have your phone and license plate on file - electronically, so don’t even try. (Unless of course you have another phone and another car.) Unfortunately, we have two phones, but only one car.

So, what did we get? Well we had a nice drive through the countryside. We came home with 26 bottles of Westvleteren Bruin 12 (“Best beer in the world”), two bottles of the Bruin 8, four Blonds and 2 glasses. Oh, and a new respect for the power of the red velvet rope.

Belgian Entropy

Belgium seems to function best in the presence of some disorder: A fact that is evidenced by our lack of a federal government for about a year. I like to think of it like the second law of thermodynamics. The more order that Belgium tries to impose through its small bureaucracies, the more other parts of the country have to release that energy by increasing the disorder and devolving into chaos. Our town is doing its part by hosting a music festival through the weekend. Much of the festivity is happening almost immediately out our front door. In typical Belgian fashion, the festival has taken over much of the available parking in the town and has blocked several streets. One of which leads to my car park, meaning that I had to rush home early to ensure I could snag one of the remaining public spots near the library. Getting to that spot was more challenging than usual as everyone else had the same idea. With the blockades funneling the town into the narrow rat’s nest of streets and alleys, the insane priorite adroit laws made every intersection a potential collision. Driving around here was already an exercise in extreme evasive maneuvers. It has now degenerated to vehicular anarchy.

Contrasting this however is the experience I had at the Police station yesterday. I need to get a Belgian driver’s license, which seems a little oxymoronic once you see how Belgians drive – You have one year from the time you move to transfer your license to a Belgian one and my year is almost up. The process is fairly straightforward, if not a little bureaucratic. First, you bring your U.S. license to the police station. They check it’s authenticity and issue you a letter that you bring to the town hall along with your U.S. license. They confiscate your U.S. license and issue you your Belgian license. The Belgian license is paper card stock with your photo taped to it (I am not kidding). It also never expires. The police were busy yesterday, so asked me to leave them my phone number and they would call when it was ready. I thought that was nice enough, so I was even more surprised when later in the evening an envelope dropped through our mail slot containing my letter. They apparently saw where I lived and hand delivered it on their way home. Can you imagine a U.S. government official doing the same thing?

So the lesson here is one of Belgian Entropy. Getting your driver’s license is quick and efficient (although it results in a very un-official looking document) which then must be offset by the poor quality of Belgian Drivers and infuriating complexity of Belgian Roads and driving laws. Somehow it works.

Beer Glasses

That is, Beer Glasses not Beer Goggles. Belgians take their beer glasses very seriously. Almost every beer has it's own glass. Most would be considered Tulips but there are many other shapes as can be seen by some of the photos on this site. Some say that the shape is designed to enhance the various beers, but that is just marketing. As someone who has always drunk beer from bottles however, I have to say that I believe it is better to drink your beer from a glass. Being able to smell the beer while you are drinking enhances the flavor. And if nothing else, it is fun collecting all the obscure shapes.

I am woefully behind on the blog posts, so am going to try to catch up on about two weeks of tastings here. SWMBO and I popped by Moeder Lambic over the weekend for a quick beverage after enjoying noodles at Au Bon Bol. She has decided that her favorite beer is the Saint Monon Au Miel. I would agree that it is pretty tasty. We had it fresh from the tap and on a hot day, it was quite refreshing. A slight honey note with fruity background. It was a fairly light beer for being 8%. Three and a half Drunk Monks.

My selection at Moeder Lambic was a Lambic blend from Tilquin Gueuzerie. This is not a beverage for amateurs. With the natural fermentation and lambic sourness, this is a beer that fights back. It has almost an oily mouth feel and a serious tart edge. Beneath that though is a fruity malty beer with a lot of complexity. Also three and a half drunk monks.

Last up was a Djean triple. A good beer to follow up the lambic. Crisp, a little hop but not spectacular. Three Drunk monks.

The final beer to review is a Valeir Xtra. My first sip had me thinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. That is about the best way I could review this. Crisp refreshing and the most hoppy beer I have had since living in Belgium . And as hot as today was, a good beer to end the evening with. Three and a half drunk monks.