“You’re going to Belgium?” One of my more outspoken and discerning food critic friends asked with obvious distaste, “To do what, see how much mayonnaise you can eat?”I have to admit that I had similar reservations about the food. I had heard about the waffles, and the french fries, and I kept hearing about buffets that offer fifteen different kinds of mayo infusions. Honestly, I was sort of expecting the cuisine to be like  in England (another country that I have never visited but still feel strongly that they have horrible food). Fried everything, extra grease, slathered in mayonnaise, and served in a soggy paper cone. Yet the Belgian tourism office website declares in huge font straight away that this place is a “Foodie’s Delight,” that fine haute cuisine abounds with the quality of the French and the quantity of the German. Of course I understand that the Belgian tourism office website exists solely to get people to come spend money in Belgium, and that they’re likely to have a palpable bias, but I figured that if the food was really as bad as I imagined, that they might just not mention it. So I came in cautiously optimistic, with an open mind.

I come to tell you now that the cuisine of West Flanders is unbelievably good. In your face, haters.

Whether it’s braised rabbit in a rich and spicy bearnaise (with a heaping side of fries), mussels steamed in white wine and garlic (with a heaping side of fries), or a chicken, crusted in herbs and roasted to succulence (with a heaping side of fries), it’s all magnificent. It seems as though Belgian tourism got it right. It really is haute French cuisine, and plenty of it.

A nice dinner doesn’t really come cheap, though, it’s easy to spend $30-40 before even ordering a beer. So it’s a good thing that the street meat is just as good. A bratwurst is just a few Euro and those waffles we keep hearing about are even less.

I wish now that I’d taken a few photos of the food, but I just can’t quite get myself to pull the trigger on that in a restaurant. Maybe next time. I did get a snap of this $7 coffee in Bruges, though:

Worth it? Yes.

We’ve been tooling around the country near Roselare for a few days now. Really, ever since we got here. We’re getting around, now, to setting out from the womb of R&Breakfast for the cruel, cold, rainy, Belgian coast. I suppose if we had gone five days ago, we would have found sun and heat, but then, the Belgians are a people starved for sun and heat. If we had gone five days ago, then we also would have found crowds. Which terrify me. Even more terrifying than crowds are crowds of people speaking a language you don’t understand. And even more terrifying than that are crowds of people speaking a Germanic language that you don’t understand. If I thought that there might be crowds of people speaking a Slavic language that I don’t understand I simply wouldn’t go.

No, it’s much better that we find the beach wrapped in the damp embrace of misting rain and drear. I would otherwise find myself reduced to a quaking puddle of tears, self-loathing, and french fries.

These last few days in the Roeselare area have been a little bit of a blur. We made it back to Ieper/Ypres/Yjpr and Passchaendaele in a more timely fashion and made it into the museums which had locked the door in our faces before. We visited a couple of very small breweries, and a very large cookie factory. We rode bikes on some little roads and Tom really liked the light. We went to this rally race. Hollande was ridiculed by Europe and the NYT.

I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.

Belgium is, by many rights, the land of beer and chocolate (I haven’t been in to a chocolatier yet . . .), but beer selection in pubs is actually sort of limited. Beer production seems to be either at a national/international scale, or an incredibly local scale, without much in between. So when you go to a pub, you can get 3-4 of the national brands (think Budweiser, but more difficult to pronounce) and a handful of the local beers. But each bar has, pretty much, the same 8-10 beer selection. It’s not the orgy of innumerable tastes that I had anticipated. After a day or two you sort of find something that you like and roll with it.

This beer (available Sateside) warns us not to turn the bottle on its side or pour it into a juice glass.

We dropped in on the Saijsoenbrouwerij Vandewelle for a meeting with the brewer, a tour of the place, and a taste. Unreal. This is Chris Vandewalle:

Chris shows off his grandfather’s recipe book

Also in Lo-Reninge we visited a giant cookie factory. All I can really remember from that is the anxiety that I felt when one of the cookies would sneak past all of the vacuum powered cookie sucker arms that moved the finished product from a conveyor belt. It makes me think that there’s a Finding Nemo-esque story in there somehwere . . .

Hang in there, little cookie. You are lost but not forgotten.

Nico Mattan stood us up. But that’s a story for later.

After some breakfast, museuming, and a bit of high intensity napping, we made our way towards Izegem to check out the Izegem Koers pro race. The town has a bit of an American/Montana connection, it’s where the Euro Cross Camp is headquartered, and Tom has spent a lot of time there.

This area of Flanders is steeped in cycling heritage and rabid fanhood, and this race in particular has a long tradition of being a local holiday. We were told later that the factories in town close each year on the first Thursday in September so that no one can miss the event. I had heard tales of the drunken uproarious crowds, slinging accolades and jeers from behind riot barricades and bloodshot eyes; of old men, mothers, and children, worn bleary from beer, mayonnaise, and the exhaustion that comes from a whole day’s efforts seeped in partisan rage. I couldn’t wait to charge into that fray wielding sausage and beer, and immerse myself in Belgian cycling culture.

And yet our arrival set us upon a tepid corps of disinterested lookers on. At the finish line the riders came through to see one lap to go. The chaos and discord that I had so anticipated was in fact a viscous mass of thin lips and puckered faces. The race leader was alone off the front. He had earned five seconds and was resting his forearms on the tops of his handlebars, his face a picture of misery as he time trialed off the front before the tattered remains of a chase group which bore down behind him. It was an ideal of the glory and self flagellation that I think synonymous with the Flandrien, and yet they were met with silence. Muffled conversations continued without pause, a man sitting near me never looked up from his newspaper. As they came through the riders edged to the right side of the road to avoid the wispy plume of cigarette smoke that wafted from the beer garden and onto the course.

Hours later a fan explained to us that while, yes, the race is a local icon, perhaps 100 years old, it is still a local race. “Oh yes. The riders here are professionals, but they are very low level,” Glen explained when I asked him about the lackluster fans, “with the Vuelta going on now, all of the big riders are there.”

And there it was. These young men had born their flesh and their souls for the amusement of a crowd that wanted celebrity.

But to say that the fans were ungrateful would be misleading. They just didn’t seem particularly invested in the results of this race. The entire city was in the grips of a celebration of cycling. An extemporaneous carnival filled the marketplace. The only businesses that were open were the bars, and the recent bout of fine weather ensured that they were empty inside. Instead the streets were flooded with jubilant packs of friends and families.

The Wild Rockies Landscaping European Office was enlisted to assist with the pretty impressive infrastructure that they had in place for a Thursday afternoon race:

TomRob sizes up the street meat situation in Izegem.

These are the three person outdoor urinals that were strewn about the city.

“No no, your shoes are definitely more ‘Euro’ than mine.”

And we made it to one of the scavenger hunt sites: De Pekker.

The revelry couldn’t last forever, and before it got dark we decided to go. We talked about looking for the Team USA development house in Izegem, we’d heard that it was damaged in a fire (accident or insurance fraud, it’s up to you to decide) and wanted to check it out. “The only thing about going to the house,” Tom pointed out, “is that I really don’t know where it is.” And so we rolled back towards Roeselare. Most of the 10k between the towns is along a paved bike path which parallels a shipping canal. At one point, though, at the outskirts of Roeselare is a bar with an artificial beach, which doubles for commuters as a cyclocross sand section.

Outside of the bar is a spa that advertises with its own UNIMOG:

Best spa ever?

In the end we made it back to R&Breakfast just after sunset. “A Belgian sunset,” Tom pondered, “I haven’t seen many of those. One year when I was in Belgium I only saw the sun twice.”

I’m mostly just glad that the finer parts of American culture are making it across the pond.

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.

“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.

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 . . .