The Most Important Thing

One thing that I’ve never really gotten comfortable with is breakfast abroad. In the states, I don’t usually get all that fired up about it, a lot of days I just skip it. More often than not I’ll grab a little something at Le Petit for what amounts to a European breakfast anyway. But there’s just something about having the option of getting a three egg omelet, biscuits and gravy, a side of hash browns, and a bottomless vat of threadbare coffee that is comforting. These just aren’t things that are usually available in the countries that I’ve visited.

Belgium isn’t really much different in this regard, if we’re honest. It’s centered around bread and jams and chocolate, mostly, and at least where we’ve been the coffee is better than anticipated. Well, here’s what we’ve been having most days:

Candlelit dinners are one thing, but only at R&Breakfast are there candlelit breakfasts with a selection of sprinkles, either fruit or chocolate.
Rustic breads with local meats and cheeses. Lex described the baking culture in northern Europe as endangered. In Holland most of the bakeries are closed on weekends, especially on Sundays, and fresh bread can’t be had those days. The baker here is “a big man, with big hands, and he makes big breads,” Lex explained. “Sometimes people will come from France where the croissants are so delicate and tiny that you can barely see them. Then they will have his croissants and they cannot believe it. They are huge.” We haven’t come across these local croissants just yet, but we will be sure to take a crack at them when we do.

Each morning we find an assortment of both store bought and homemade marmalade, but the real decision making doesn’t come in until we look over the spreadable chocolates.

The table sags underneath a tray of fifteen different jars. Some of them are familiar, Nutella and Speculoos (smooth and crunchy), but most of them are not. There are national boutique spreads, the equivalent of JIF, and a number of simple glass jars with handwritten labels from just down the street in any direction. I’ve never been able to figure out why these chocolate spreads have never caught on in the States.
It’s been a pretty lazy day so far. Tom and I are recovering from the harrowing deliberations of yesterday’s foray into the Flanders countryside, and have felt much safer napping in Roeselare. We made it out to a cycling museum this morning, and couldn’t help but notice the candor of the high school smoking culture here. We rode past a school at lunch hour, and there were scores of young people sitting on the front steps hitting the cigs hard. It felt just like Spokane. We also saw a teenager in a shirt that read in large block letters, “Fuck Swag.” That was sort of refreshing.
It’s just a brief post, you’ll have to excuse me. We’re running off now to check out the Izegem Koers and have a beer with Nico Mattan. I trust that tomorrow’s update will have much more to say.

If At First You Ask In Flemish

“I think we should go this way, through Passandale,” Tom opined, “that way we’ll at least sort of know where we are.”

Our first day of bicycle touring in Belgium promised to be as dreamlike and easy as we had imagined. Paved single lane bike paths criss-cross the entire country, what drivers are on the roads share them graciously, and every ten kilometers or so is another town with its own brewery (or selection of breweries) and boulevard cafes in the midst of a medieval cityscape. Each intersection is numbered marked with a clear green sign, and a straightforward and intuitive map lays out the entire network with easy to follow icons for each of the junctions.

The problem, of course, with generally straightforward and intuitive instructions is that when they cease to be straightforward and intuitive, those people relying on them for salvation immediately assume the worst, that all is lost, and a deep anxiety and depression begins to take hold.

We left Roeselare for Ieper just moments after our declared 10am departure time. Not really. I believe that we finally locked the door at R&Breakfast at a little past 2. But after only about ten minutes of riding we found ourselves immersed in all of what Belgian bike touring has to offer, and followed a bike trail for several kilometers. I don’t even like bike touring, but this was pretty cool.

Before long, however, we came to a juncture where our three map resources disagreed. We found ourselves at the edges of two maps, where they overlap, only each map (produced as part of the same box set by the same publisher) showed a slightly, but substantial, difference in the orientation of the roads. Tom’s iPhone said we were many kilometers away from where we were pretty sure we were. So logic told us that at least two of the mutually exclusive resources were wrong, and it didn’t seem entirely impossible that all three could be misleading and that we really were doomed.

Tom and I were left to our intuition, which we both admitted had been spotty recently. Fortunately there are a lot of cyclists in the area, and apparently this spot is confusing for all of us. We were standing at what amounted to an occlusion in the trail and a trickle of other riders began to pile up around us.

I believe that the following interactions generally looked something like this:

Photo compliments of Tom Robertson.

I first reached out to a German couple who were just leaving the pub across the street. It went something like this:

Me: Excuuser mij, waar is Iepen?
German Lady: (looked very uncomfortable, shook her head no, and avoided eye contact)
German Guy: Ik spreek Nederlands niet, sprechen sie Deutsch? Parlez-vous Francais? English?
Me: No Francais, English. Do you know how to get to Iepen from here?
German Guy: No English.
Me: Se habla Espanol? Usted se sabe si se puede ir a Ieper de aqui?
German Guy: Ack! Nein Spanish! (German guy then began an onslaught of directions in German, of which I understood none. On seeing my glazed over eyes and the downturned corners of my mouth, he turned around, waved his arms dismissively, and walked away.)
Me: Dank u!
German Guy: (Did not reply, except to continue waving his arms.)

Fortunately, by the time that exercise in futility had passed, a group of middle-aged ladies on cruiser bikes had begun to amass.

Me: Excuuser mij, waar is Iepen?

At that point, I realized the problem with learning how to ask just one open ended question in a foreign language. I received a deluge of what may have been helpful information, but did not understand a word. In the future I will work on learning how to ask more “yes” or “no” questions.

One of the members of their group spoke a little bit of English, and so we made more headway.

Belgian Lady #3: Iepen, yes?
Me: Yes.
Belgian Lady #3: Have you tried to go down this road here? (She pointed towards a dirt road that a ways further petered into rough gravel, then doubletrack, then a cow pasture with an unwelcoming German Shephard.)
Me: Yes. I don’t think it’s that way.
Belgian Lady #3: Where did you come from today?
Me: Roeselare.
Belgian Lady #3: Roeselare . . . Roeselare!? That is not very far from here. (I am not sure if she tried to mask the condescent in her voice or not. If she did try, she did not do so very hard.)
Me: Yes, I know.

We carried on for a few more minutes in a convoluted mixture of broken English, their Dutch, my “Dutch,” and emphatic gesticulation. Tom and I reconvened and decided to try the dirt road again, but with more fortitude this time. The newly formed Belgian posse (now six strong) seemed perplexed that we had decided to go the one way that we had just said we had been, and that was not the right path. Nonetheless, after our newly found fortitude still proved to be insufficient and we turned around, we found that all six of them had followed us.

When we passed them a second time with a sullen, “nee,” they seemed content to deliberate amongst themselves, and did not ask us for advice again.

Eventually we settled on a more circuitous route through Passendale, and made our way with no further complication to our destination, Ieper. We were going there to look at a WWI museum. We finally arrived promptly at 5pm, to find them locking the doors. I suppose we’ll have to go back to Ieper again. It’s a good thing there’s a lot to do there this weekend . . .

Ik zal Nederlands leren.

Jetlag is such a strange experience. Rather than simply feeling tired at the wrong times, I find myself in the middle of the day unable to walk or interact, yet sleep seems to flirt half a moment out of reach. I lie in bed with sweating shins, staring at the ceiling in a queer sort of semi-somniferous dream state. Moments and concepts mingle like different colored smokes and I float at the cusp of lucidity, drifting in and out with the tides of sleep. When I finally rise, I have no concept of time whatsoever, and I would as much believe that I had been down for 20 minutes as that I had missed a whole day and was feared deceased.

This is what the ceiling above my bed looks like at the R&Breakfast in Roeselare.

I suppose that the better way is to fight the thing. To drink coffee and stay active throughout the daylight hours, and waking for the day at 3 a.m. to remain still, count the breaths, and trust that sleep will come. I struggle to do that, because as much as I like coffee, I love napping. And in the midst of a jetlag nap it is as though I’m napping like my life depends on it. That’s how good it is.

Also I’ve been trying to learn Flemish from a Lonely Planet Dutch phrase book. Rereading that sentence makes the task sound absolutely insurmountable, and I acknowledge that fluency is probably more than two weeks and a pocket manual away, but already today I knew what I was ordering for lunch and wasn’t corrected when I thanked the waitress. I‘m also pretty sure I know how to ask for a bike pump, but before it came to that I found one and never had the opportunity to test my hypothesis. 
So far the cost of Dutch fluency has been getting talked into a €20 lunch. In the future I believe that I will try to order from the menu. Tomorrow we’ll be off on our bikes to Ieper for some museum learning and waffles.

To Vacillate Once More: An Open Source Adventure

“I am not an overtly religious person,” Lex explained to us as he led a meandering tour through the catacombs and verandas of his guest house, “but historically, the great castles each had a chapel.” And what a castle it is, belied by its normal avenue.

The journey to Roeselare has taken me from Missoula by road to Spokane, from where I embarked on a three legged flight. Each portion of the trip, first to Denver, then to Frankfurt, and culminating in Brussels, took place in quick succession so that I never had much time to sit stewing in an airport. All the better. Aside from my economy class ticket being kin to steerage, the trip so far has been without incident and generally as pleasant as air travel can be expected to be.

The final portion of this initial voyage has deposited Tom and me at the R&Breakfast guest house (his photos are much finer than mine). The place is unassuming from the street. Its glass door barely stands out in the facade of shops and swinging garage ports.

We arrived to locked doors and were quickly pounced upon by the gregarious and immediately familiar Lex, proprietor of the B&B and a friend of Tom’s from trips before. “You should have texted,” he scolded, “I should be here to show you in.” We had arrived unannounced at an inopportune time, finding Lex running errands and us standing on the curb for a few minutes.

The Red Room.

Lex whisked us inside and began the tour. A melange of old and new, the place was built in the 1920s and its old world charm is somehow complemented by frosted glass doors, a remodeled kitchen, and austere, modern bedrooms. The common areas maintain a century old aesthetic with only updated accents, and he showed us the separate mens’ and womens’ lounges. “This room is for the ladies,” he explained, before adding, “or for men too. That’s ok too.”

Boss Tom in Robertson Hall.

The two had met years before when Tom was covering the robust local cyclocross culture, their friendship burgeoned and Tom has been certain to return each year. Lex dedicated a room for Tom’s European office, but “I had to convert it,” he apologized, “it is the mens’ lounge now.”

On the same floor he pushed open a cracked door. “This is my secret sanctuary.” The room gapes open with a tall vaulted ceiling and is mostly unfinished. Wires for light fixtures hang naked from rough hewn rafters and bare plaster still covers three of the walls. The only working finish is a yellow ceiling light which bears down on a 3’x5′ canvas, held up by a sturdy wooden easel. The sketch and beginnings of a watercolor landscape lilts across the cloth. “This is where I paint,” he declared softly before closing the door.

Just one of the balconies overlooking the narrow winding medieval alleys.

The kitchen and rooms each came with a balcony, fitted with a table and chairs or sometimes with bare turf. Beneath them he led us across a walled garden to an outbuilding with a stained glass window of three old men from Bethlehem. “Some people think that it is strange to have a chapel,” he said finally, “but I am the king of my castle here, so I built a chapel.”

——————————————————————————————–

And so I met Lex, and began to get situated for the next two weeks riding bikes in and around Belgium. We ate at a (perhaps?) Egyptian restaurant and I did not bring my Dutch (or Arabic) phrase book, so the ordering process consisted mostly of me pointing, grinning like an idiot, and saying “thank you” in heavily accented English. It is a well known fact that the best way to blend in when abroad is to simply speak your native tongue and assume the accent of the country you are visiting. I ordered something with a lot of syllables that sounded very adventurous. I received plain grilled chicken breast and a pile of raw shredded carrots. Next time I will remember the phrase book.

It dawned on Tom and me last week that while we are over here working on some work projects, we likely have a great deal more time (two weeks) than we are likely to need for the project (perhaps a few days). And so to keep ourselves and our subscribers amused, we came up with the idea of a Belgian scavenger hunt. We’ve got a few ideas, but because it would probably be lame to pick out all of the items on your own scavenger hunt, we’re asking you all to join in. In exchange we’ll do our best to get it done and document it either here or on Tom’s website. Here’s what we’ve got:

1) Get a hair cut.
2) Eat at a Mexican restaurant.
3) Use Tom’s press credentials to get into a sporting event for free.
4) ???

Chime in, if you’re willing, and we’ll see what we can do.

Rage Revisited

I’ve been trying to quit, or at least spend much less time on Facebook recently. I’ve had a hard time cutting ties entirely because of certain promotional requirements, and I like being invited to things, and, frankly, most of the traffic to this site comes from there. I still find myself signing in once a week or so, and when I did so last night came to the stark conclusion that we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

No less than 80% of my newsfeed was occupied by VMA this, Miley Cirus that, and apparently Taylor Swift was adorable. You don’t say. Meanwhile, headlines elsewhere on the internet depicted a conversation that has been going something like this:

Syrian Civilians: Shit.
Syrian Military: That was totally not us.
Obama Administration: Are you really serious right now?
Putin Government: It’s cool, we’ll vouch for them.
Obama Administration: You have to be kidding.
DoD: Say I won’t.
Putin Government: You better not.
US Border Patrol: I do what I want, FTW! LOL!
Obama Administration: No, no, no. These people are different from those people. Stop looking over there.
Congress: C’mon, we’ve definitely demonstrated our ability to make controversial, time sensitive decisions. We really mean it this time, we love votes with sex appeal. Just don’t come crying to us when you’re sick, is all.
American Public: I wonder if Robin Thicke’s mother knows what that song is about?
Missoula: Go Griz! That’s definitely a real team that plays in a real league, and not an institutionalized racketeering ring! Let’s impart on these boys a culture of impunity and encourage our state to aim high with DUI deaths! Maroon out, yeah!

And these aren’t idiots I’m friends with on Facebook. These are smart, critical thinking, sometimes Ivy League educated young people. So what the fuck? Have we been so bludgeoned with constant sensationalized news that we’re numb to the implications of it? Do we just not care? Do we really care, but feel like Facebook just isn’t the forum for actual discussion?

I got to thinking about getting off of a plane in Seattle a year or two ago. I had walked through a bustling terminal, past a moving walkway and down an escalator. As I waited for my checked luggage, I texted my parents to pull from the cell phone lot. Outside, gray clouds hovered low enough to obscure the tops of the buildings, and a constant drizzle let oil slick puddles form over storm drains. Twice a minute speakers emitted a barely-too-loud automated voice to remind us that, for our safety, the Transportation Security Administration recommends that we live in fear whenever convenient. A peace officer on a Segway (really, guys, a Segway?) scooted along a line of stressed and waiting loved ones to usher them along, lest some nefarious plot manifest (it’s for our safety, after all). On the way home we stopped for gas and at the pump were confronted with a newly installed television screen, advertising the unbelievable deals on Red Bull and corn dogs that waited just inside the shop. The whole scene made me feel as though I had boarded a plan in Missoula, and disembarked in Blade Runner‘s bruised and broken Los Angeles, 2019.

The experience reminded me of a webcomic published at xkcd:

More Accurate

The mouseover text on the original site reads, “We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

It made me think for a moment that perhaps an impending dystopian future is not what we have to fear, but that we have already arrived. And with the ill have come the pleasant distractions that allow us to tolerate it. Sure, we don’t have flying taxi cabs, but really, have you ever navigated Google Earth on an iPad? Whoa. And then there’s always this.