Before moving on to describe the rest of the trip, here’s some other highlights of the two weeks I spent in Belgium.  During the day, other Dan and I worked on installing two of our company’s systems at a nuclear pharmacy on the outskirts of a tiny Belgian town called Seneffe.

How small?  I’m not sure it even HAD a hotel, which is why we were staying in the neighboring, slightly larger town of Nivelles.  The nearest LARGE town to us was Charleroi, and I’m actually sort of glad we weren’t staying there, since if you search for it on YoutTube, you get a bunch of videos with titles like “I Visited the Most Depressing City in Europe.”

We never actually went there.

Nivelles itself has a very pretty town square with a 12^th century cathedral and a number of little brasseries around the outside.  We ate dinner on this square more than once, and it was nice seeing everyone out enjoying the weather.

This being Belgium, I did have mussels while we were there, of course.  But it turns out Nivelles also has a local specialty, the “Tart Djote”.  “Djote” turns out to be the local word for “Chard”, so this is a vegetable pie in a short crust, which consists of not much more than chard, cheese, and butter.  (Why are the first syllables of “chard” and “cheese” so different?  English is weird.)

Nivelles takes this dish so seriously that they have an annual competition, featuring a select panel of judges with detailed criteria for judging the perfect tart. Here’s the official tarte djote website.

I had one – it was pretty good.  Also AMAZINGLY filling – I couldn’t eat more than half at one sitting.  Neither could other Dan’s mom.

The other thing I of course had plenty of in Belgium is beer.  Highlights:

• the first beer in my room was a Belgian tripel recommended by one of the staff at the pharmacy. Very good, AND I learned how to open a beer bottle with a strike plate.
• Deciding just because I COULD do that didn’t make it a good idea, I acquired a bottle opener and some LOCAL beers from the nearby supermarket. They were fine, but I need to be more careful about not accidentally buying pale ales when I don’t want them.
• Lots of beers in restaurants, ALWAYS served in the correct glass for the brewery.
• A cherry beer called…

Wait, what the hell am I talking about.  There was only one beer highlight, and it was this:

Some fraction of the readers’ jaws are now dropping, and for everyone else, I will explain.  Westvletteren 12 is one of the most difficult beers in the world to acquire.  It is made at ONE monastery in Belgium, and they only make enough to pay their bills.  It doesn’t get exported or distributed – if a restaurant wants to offer it, they have to send someone to the monastery to buy it, where they will be permitted to buy a single case, and that’s all.

We had dinner on the hotel restaurant during the first week, and I was perusing the prices on the beer list, which were, of course, at hotel restaurant prices: 7 euros, 8 euros, 7 euros, 9 euros, 25 euros…

Wait, what?

This hotel actually has Westvlettern on the menu? I mean, sure, it’s about $40 for a 375 cl bottle, but how many times in my life am I going to get to try this beer?

Unbelievably, this makes two.

I didn’t start drinking until I was 40 years old, for a variety of reasons, and for the first few months I was very cautious in my consumption – only one beer at a time, and only in public with friends.  Which meant that for something like five months after I started, I had never actually had a bottled beer – just draft.

I was in grad school at this point, and at some point I went to a retirement party for someone from the lab where I was doing my PhD.  My wife came along and ended up sitting next to the lab manager.  She didn’t know any more about accelerator physics than what I had inflicted on her, and he didn’t know anything about music theory… so they talked about beer.

Apparently he asked if she had ever tried this incredibly rare Belgian beer, and she said, no, no one has ever tried that beer. “Oh, I’ve got some in my basement, I’ll give you one.”  She did not, of course, believe this for a second.

And one appeared on my desk the next day.

And that’s how the first beer I ever tried out of a bottle was Westvletteren 12.

Getting back to the main not-actually-linear narrative, the other place we visited were an evening in the nearby town of Namur, which has a very nice castle.  You should go see it.

Finally, at the end of the trip I took the train back up to Brussels to continue on my way and had a few hours to spend near the train station, which is where I learned the difference between a Belgian Waffle and a Brussels Waffle.  Belgian waffles are chewier and irregularly shaped.  Brussels Waffles are thinner and lighter and square-er.

This one was also served in a very nice hipster coffee shop with a Chemex of probably the best coffee I had all trip.  And then it was off to Paris!

After spending all day Saturday in a group, on Sunday I struck out on my own…

…to the laundromat. I had, after all, been in Europe for 2 weeks at this point with one carry-on sized suitcase.

The process was reasonably well documented, and another very nice customer was at pains to make sure I understood how everything worked.  There was a vending machine for soap, and the washing machines were all controlled from a central terminal, although oddly, the dryers were not.

Laundry accomplished, I headed back to the hotel to drop off my clothes and make a plan to do some sightseeing.  I needed to get to the Nivelles train station, and since the next bus wasn’t for a while, I decided to just walk.  This was going to turn out to be a theme for the day.

Just one stop down the train tracks from Nivelles is Brain-L’Alleud, where the historic battle of Waterloo took place.  (Not to be confused with the neighboring town of Waterloo, where the historic battle of Waterloo did not take place.)  Waterloo represented the last decisive defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, and is part of why many of us are stuck using inches and pounds to this very day.

After a long, sweaty walk to the train station, I bought my train ticket to Brain-L’Alleud and boarded my train, which looked suspiciously like a bus.  Just a few weeks prior, I took the Hamilton Street Railway and an Air Canada flight in Hamilton, Ontario, both of which looked a lot like busses.  And now this Belgian train, which also appeared to be a bus.

When the “train” arrived in Brain-L’Alleud, I first got lunch at a really excellent little Syrian place next to the station.  Seriously, if you ever go there, this is where you want to have lunch – some of the best schwarma I’ve ever had.

Then I looked at the bus schedule, realized the next bus to the battlefield wasn’t for a while, and decided to walk.  This MAY have been a poor choice.  It was, after all, about 27 (I mean 80 – THANKS NAPOLEON) degrees out.  After another long, sweaty walk, I arrived at the battlefield.

Only to discover that the once-a-year reenactment of the battle had taken place that morning, and I had missed it.  Then again, I REALLY needed laundry.

There’s a few different things to see at Waterloo.  The most obvious from a distance is the Mound of the Lion.  It is a huge hill that dominates the landscape of the battlefield, and commemorates the wounding of William II of Orange, arguably maybe the fifth most important commander present at the battle. Maybe.

Or maybe it commemorates the battle more generally.  Given its scale, that’s the more charitable reading.  Heck of a view form the top, anyway.

There’s also a very well executed museum that talks at length about the history of the battle, the uniforms, the weapons, the commanders, and very little about why Napoleon was not actually a very nice man.  (Spoiler: he wasn’t.)

There’s also a display of Napoleonic scenes recreated in Lego, which is pretty neat.  Here’s the retreat from Moscow:

Next the Big Hill of the Moderately Important Guy who Lived Thirty Four More Years After The Battle is a panorama, a kind of nineteenth century VR installation where you stand inside a 360 degree painting and see the battle illustrated all around you.  That was actually pretty neat.

But honestly, the most impressive thing was just walking a few hot and sweaty kilometers around the battlefield and appreciating the importance of this particular bit of Belgian farmland to the history of the world.  Counterfactuals are always a bit iffy, but there’s one small gate in the wall of one small farmhouse at one end of the battle line that could potentially have changed the course of everything if it had been successfully breached. (as it almost was.)

It was also a hoot walking around surrounded by all the reenactors, who were largely still there after their morning’s exertions, and also largely still in costume.  Made it even easier to visualize being back in 1815, except for the bit where they were also largely tailgating next to their cars at this point.

At the end of my visit, I was at the other end of the battlefield from the bus stop, so I decided to just go ahead and walk back to the bus station.  I blame heat exhaustion at this point from preventing me from doing something dumb like this much more walking in the sun.

At least I didn’t walk back to my hotel from the train station in Nivelles.  No, instead of that I (checks notes)… oh wait, no, I did do that.  It was a long day.

For my first Saturday in Belgium, I went to Bruges with my coworker Dan and his parents, who had flown to Europe for a bit of a family vacation with Dan.

Belgium is divided into two halves, the Dutch speaking northern half, and the French speaking southern one.  Interestingly, the Dutch speakers are required to learn French in school, but the French speakers are NOT required to learn Dutch.  Make of that what you will.

Our installation was in the Wallonia (the southern region), so our field trip was to Flanders in the north.  Our destination for the day, Bruges, is a beautifully preserved medieval city with stepped roofs, canals, a bell tower, and all that stuff.

It was also the setting for an extremely violent comedy starring Colin Firth. We did not encounter any gunfire, fortunately.

What we did encounter was tourists – lots and lots of tourists.  To be fair, WE were tourists, so it’s not as though we weren’t part of the problem. But it’s frustrating, because Leigh has been encouraging me to go to Bruges for as long as we’ve been married – she has very fond memories of trips there in the ‘90s.

And I can see why; the city IS beautiful.  But it also has a lot of McDonalds and Starbucks and Instagrammers, just like everywhere else in the world at this point.  Too many people wanting to see not enough stuff, I guess.

But with that discussion out of the way, let’s find out about the stuff I personally got to see.  To start with, the architecture really is just impossibly picturesque.  The city was in a bit of an industrial depression during the World Wars, so it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to bomb it.  As such, a lot more of it has survived more intact than in many comparably aged cities in this part of Europe.

We wandered around a bit just gawping at stuff, and then bought a ticket to climb up the bell tower.  The entire time we were up there, a carillon recital was underway.  This was good and bad.

Good, because I am actually a former carillonneur – I learned to play at Yale and continued to actively perform in Cleveland until I moved to Michigan. Bad, because those suckers are LOUD – the best place to hear a carillon concert is emphatically NOT six feet from the bells. Still, the performer was excellent, and he played a range of pieces, from traditional Dutch carillon preludes all the way up to “Ring of Fire.”

The view was pretty nice too.

On returning to ground level, we found a nice little café a bit away from the tourist center to have lunch, and then headed back into the madding throng to do the other traditional activity in Bruges, a tour of the canals.

Bruges has many canals earning it the (possibly self-issued) nickname “The Venice of Belgium.”  But while the canal boat tour COULD have been a total tourist gimmick, it really wasn’t.

For starters, Bruges is just as pretty from the water as from land, if not more so.

Secondly, our tour guide’s ability to code switch was worth the price of admission all by itself – he gave detailed, high speed information in German, Dutch, English, and French, and it sure seemed to this monolingual tourist that all four languages were just as fluent and ready to hand as his English.

After a waffle break (this IS Belgium, after all), we headed back to the car to start the trip back to Nivelles.  But we had another stop on the way: Ghent!

Ghent is another city with an interesting medieval center, although it seems a bit more integrated into the modern city around it.

We were there late enough that it wasn’t really worth paying for admission to the castle, but we had a nice walk around looking at it and some other medieval structures.

We also saw the graffiti street, which is a LOT more fun than the gum wall in Seattle.

Finally we made our way to the 10^th century cathedral of Saint Bavo, which was architecturally amazing, and had a choral concert underway to boot.

After that long day we headed back to Nivelles, where I got a nice simple dinner from the grocery store across the street and crashed.

Normally with these travel posts, we format them Country, Day N: Location – subheader if needed. For example: Japan, Day 12: Tokyo – Harajuku.

But normally these trips don’t bounce back and forth between several different countries.  So for this one we’re just going to go with the date.

I flew out of Vancouver airport on KLM, and was fortunate enough to draw a seat with not one, not two, but THREE entire screaming babies within one row of me.  I suppose partial babies might have screamed even more, depending on the exact circumstances, now that I say that out loud.

At any rate, the new noise cancelling headphones I purchased two days earlier did their best, and I mostly made it to Belgium with my sanity intact.

And at that point, I had a few hours to kill, as my partner in crime on the “install equipment” portion of this trip (also named Dan, but not to be confused with our chemistry support person, who is named Dan) was on a later arriving flight. So I shoved my luggage in a coin locker and grabbed the train into Brussels.

Brussels is pretty.

At least, my memory, hazed as it is with massive jet lag, seems to concur with these pictures that Brussels WAS, in fact, pretty.  Although I do also remember something about pink elephants?

Wait, no, those were real.

At any rate, I just wandered around for a bit.  Saw a massive indoor shopping arcade, ate some chocolate.

And eventually made it far enough from the crowds of tourists at the city center to have a nice quiet Belgian dinner of carbonnade, the same stew we made for our Belgian meal, which we sadly haven’t gotten around to transferring over here from Facebook yet.

Also a lovely beer – served, of course, in the correct glass.

After dinner, I made my way back to the airport, and Dan L. and I made our way down to the site for our installation.  As that part of the trip is just boring (and mildly confidential) work stuff, I will NOT be sharing anything about it except possibly the occasional picture about buildings and food.