Belgium 2025 Part 2

 Day 3

I got up way before Lise and just started planning a little walking tour. There were a few sights that I’d done research about that were worth going to and I figured I could weave them into a little itinerary. None of the things were that interesting but they gave us something to do until beer:30. When Lise finally woke up, she opened the curtain to reveal a snow-glazed skyline. Even better, it was still snowing. “No way!” I screamed. I was like, let’s GOOO! I was ready to head out, and Lise got ready as quickly as she could.

We started the walking on fairly empty streets with a light snow still falling around us. The first stop on the tour was an unexpected sighting of a van delivering bags of precut, perhaps frozen fries to one of Bruges’ more well-known restaurants. I later looked up the company online and figured that while these fries were precut, they were probably still fresh and so I had not, as I assumed, caught a major restaurant committing a serious culinary crime in this deeply unserious country. The first real stop on our sight-seeing tour was just around the corner where a small stone relief on a building portrayed two young women holding a pair of pants. This marked the sight where, supposedly, a Spanish traveler was staying as a guest in this building. For days he changed his clothes except his pants before going out. One day the innkeeper’s daughters snuck into the man’s room to discover that the pants had a hole for the tail, meaning he was the devil. So the father threw the pants in the fireplace, then the Spanish devil returned and got so angry that he burned the inn down. It seems like a pretty bad story, full of holes, unless the twist at the end is that the innkeeper managed to get away with insurance fraud.

We were suddenly interrupted with a bathroom emergency, then decided to eat lunch in the room before heading back out to finish the tour. There was a bit of tension about the next stop on the tour. I had changed the order of stops on the fly because of the interruption and our next stop would take us out of town. Lise wasn’t super pumped about this, but eventually insisted that we just get it over with. So we left the center of Bruges, and were suddenly in just kind of a bland neighborhood without any of the fairytale aesthetics of little bridges over canals and medieval buildings. We headed to the main cemetery of Bruges, a thirty minute walk, to see a specific grave. Well, the cemetery, being the oldest in Belgium, was a lot bigger than I had expected. There’s a famous grave of a 19th century merchant that is adorned with a very dramatic looking moss-covered skull and crossbones. I couldn’t find any specifics about its location online and the information posted at the cemetery gave no mention of this grave. So we just wandered for a long time, hoping we would find it, but never did. It was still a pretty interesting cemetery though. It might not have been the best use of our time, but it was still interesting.

 

This is the one photo I have from the cemetery and it is very unrepresentative of how cool a lot of it looked. These small crosses were for a specific group of people...WWI soldiers? Freemasons? Former Mayors of Bruges? I can't remember.

We walked through the slushy streets back to the cozy center and did some shopping at a shop that sells all sorts of beer glasses and memorabilia. I got a new beer glass for a euro, which has proven quite useful and agreeable to use. We continued the walking tour and we found some superlatively small window. Is it the smallest window in Bruges? The smalles Medieval window in Europe? There’s no real way to tell what it is, but it is indeed a small window from the Medieval era that allowed someone inside the building to keep an eye on boats passing through the canal to make sure they stopped to pay the toll. Then we paid a visit to the 12th century Basilica of The Holy Blood. This was a unique church, first of all, because it was upstairs. I can’t say that I’ve been to a church that is upstairs before. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently there is also a chapel on the ground floor. We just went upstairs as that was where the relic we were looking there was housed. It was a piece of cloth that supposedly contained the blood of Christ. It was brought back to Bruges after the second crusade in the 12th century, however recent research disputes this story and it most likely came here a bit later during the sack of Constantinople during the fourth crusade a few decades later.  The vial that contains the piece of cloth is the original container brought back from modern day Turkey. While European churches are lousy with bogus relics, this nearly thousand year old vial with some cloth, was still a pretty cool thing to see. It was watched over the entire time by a nun.

The walking tour took us next to the nearby Blinde-Ezelstraat, or Blind Donkey Street. I came across at least one explanation of the name of this street, that, when I explained it to Lise, didn’t really make any sense, as she pointed out. It turns out that there are several bizarre and untrue explanations of why this street carries this name, but it’s basically just named after the “Blind Donkey Inn” that was here back in the 15th century. Anyway, the street is a very tight passage between the city hall and the Civil Registry. An ornately decorated passage connects the two buildings  above the street. I really wanted to come here to see the black square. Apparently cars used to be able to circulate freely in this part of town, which eventually makes the buildings filthy. After they restricted cars in the ’90’s, they power-washed the side of the building, but left a square meter unwashed to show how dirty it had gotten. It was completely black.  

Waffle time. Lise had been doing research on which waffle place would be best to go to. The weird thing about this iconically Belgian treat is that it seems almost entirely geared toward tourists. Both in Belgium and Bruges, it’s hard to find any waffle place outside of the main touristy areas. Like, are the Belgians only eating them at home or something? I never quite figured it out. So I wasn’t really caring if we didn’t find the hidden spot only known to locals. We went to the one that Lise chose, but it was closed. It had been open just a bit earlier, but not now. It had three locations in Bruges, though, so we walked to the other one. Closed too. They were supposed to be open. Waffles aren’t a morning thing, they’re a snack thing, especially in the mid afternoon. We figured the whole chain must be shut down for some reason. So we chose a different one, and ordered two Liegeois style waffles to go. For some reason it seems that the only the denser, sweeter Liegeois waffles are available to go, while the lighter, spongier Brussels waffles must be eaten at a table. Anyway, obviously they were delicious. I got mine with a caramel syrup and Lise got chocolate. I actually found the caramel a bit too sweet to go with the waffle. Lise’s relatively dark chocolate was the right choice.

Another iconic feature of Bruges is the lace. There is a history of Bruges being a center of lace production that goes back centuries, and my guess is that it this has to do with it being a center for wool trading back in the day. I can’t guarantee any of that though. We walked past a lace shop where a woman who looks exactly like you’d expect her to, sat with her back turned, weaving lace into doilies and decorations. It was intricate and quite mesmerizing to watch. We stopped in and Lise got a pair of pretty cool lace earrings and a card with lace on it for her friend.

After a quick siesta, we headed to one of the best spots in town, Staminet de Garre. It’s a really tough to find little bar/cafe. It’s small, but still has two floors. They serve a beer made by a local brewery exclusively for them. So you can only get it here. De Garre is definitely a Ballet Bar. Classy, quiet, sophisticated, but definitely not pretentious. We ordered two of the house beers, which are a very light triple. The served it with a little bowl of complimentary gouda, a lovely accompaniment to Belgian beers. The glass they serve this beer in is also unique and really one of the best glasses I’ve ever drank from. For some reason this bar closes at 7, so we couldn’t have stayed for a second glass had we wanted to.

 

The De Garre glass. The greatest glass. 

So we headed back to The Beer Wall, a Pop Bar. While it is one of the best places for an outdoor beer in the city, I think its appeal was starting to wane on me. Weak beer selection, bad music the only place that seemed to attract the more obnoxious brand of tourist. I ordered the iconic “La Corne” beer, which is served in a glass shaped like a bull horn, which has to be cradled in a little wooden frame. I’d always resisted it as it seemed gimimicky. I mean, I never saw anyone drinking this beer at any of the other bars in town, however, I just got too curious. Lise ordered a Golden Carolus. My beer was probably the closest thing to a light domestic that I tasted the whole time we were in Bruges. It wasn’t bad, it was just kinda weak and boring. However, it was mildly fun to take a sip out of this horn and  then finagle it back into its little wooden holder. This bar was closing at seven, so we left, not that we really wanted much more to do with this place anyway. Like I said, it’s in a great location, but beyond that, not one of Bruges’ better spots for a beer. 

 

The glasses of La Corne and the Golden Carolus. You can see the anti-theft tag on the Carolus, revealing what kind of low class tourist scum frequents The Beer Wall.

We headed back to our new favorite bar in Bruges (or at least top 3…or 4), the Brugs Beertje. As we walked in out of the cold, the bartender said “welcome back.” I may get a little more annoyed than I should about small slights and disrespects, a la Larry David, but I’m just as easily flattered by just a little extra politeness or attention. Lise got a Malheur Blonde and I got a Nostradamus by Caracole. It was a strong dark beer that went excellently with this cold, dreary weather.Not much else to report, just a nice relaxing time in a chill spot. We couldn’t stay long, as we wanted to get to one last place on our final night. We headed over to the other underground bar (not The Trappist, the one with the difficult name). Lise ordered a Poperings Hommelbier, but they brought a St. Omer. Could have been my fault, but since it was our last drink in town, I asked to be served the correct beer and the server obliged. I can’t remember what beer I got. Oops. The Hommelbier was also from that aformentioned town of Watou. It is a very highly regarded beer, though not even much older than me. It’s brewed with extra hops (hommel means hops), however, I was surprisingly not all that impressed by it. Maybe the northwest IPAs have me feeling like I need a bit of fruitiness in my hoppy beers.

 

Nostradamus by Caracole and the Malheur Blonde

Once again we stopped by the fry stand on the way home. Tonight it was fries with a kipcorn, which for some reason is kind of like a long chicken nugget, but crispiers. Kind of like a corn dog, but the dog is chicken and the coating is crispy and not made of corn.

Day 4

Party’s over. But first, one more waffle. We ended up at the same place, hoping for a Brussels style waffle, but as I already said, they don’t serve those to go. Not that the Liege style waffles are worth being disappointed over. I noticed that instead of cooking us a fresh waffle, they just threw two waffles back into the iron to reheat. Maybe this was why they sold those to go? The Brussels waffle are a bit more fragile and don’t take to reheating as well as the Liege ones and maybe they don’t want to be clogging up their doorway with take away customers waiting so long for fresh waffles. Liege ones are also a lot easier to deal with without a plate and a table. I went with chocolate and Lise got it with her true love, creme chantilly, whipped cream.

As we made the long trek to the car, Lise was walking kinda fast and aggressively. We were waiting at intersection for the crosswalk light to turn green. Then Lise just crossed anyway, not waiting for it to turn green. She hadn’t noticed that she was walking directly in front of a cop car. I stood still for ten more seconds, and waited for the light to change. By the time I made it across, Lise had turned right and was crossing the main boulevard. By the time I made it across, the light had turned back to red, but I just hustled to catch up to Lise.  In the back of my miind I was thinking, if any place place hassles for jaywalking, it’s definitely here. I wouldn’t have even thought about it in Paris, but I had noticed how pedestrians always waited for the lights here, unlike back in France. Sure enough, I heard a whoop whoop from behind me, and the cops pulled up next to us. I’m sure they knew we weren’t from there, but they started speaking to us in Flemish and we just stared. Then they switched to English and asked where we were from. He started to say that we should respect the local laws, before switching and saying that it’s pretty much the same law in France too and come to think of it, that’s how it is everywhere. “I think even in Asia you have to stop for lights,” he added at the end. I thought that part was hilarious. Anyway, they let us off with a warning.

 

Ghost bike near where we parked.

On our way out of town, we stopped at the grocery store.  We got some of our favorite beers and also some random new ones to try. We also got some local treats like aged gouda, some kind of cured sausage and a bag of pickle flavored chips that were called “Ribble Chips”. This felt very silly.

On our way home we stopped off in Lille. We parked near the Marche de Wazzemmes. This area has a similar reputation to Saint-Denis as a place with lots of immigrants and crime. Of course I don’t find Saint-Denis as very sketchy, but the area where we parked left me seriously uneasy. The people hanging around on the corner were seriously sizing us up, but then also asking us if we needed anything. The market was mostly closed by the time we got there, so we didn’t linger. We went next door to a little old school kebab shop for lunch. An elderly Turkish man was running the shop and presumably his wife was forming falafels from a giant basin of ground chickpeas and herbs. We each got the normal kebab with feta added. The bread was homemade and the thing was absolutely delicious. I’d kind of given up on kebabs because they’re usually kind of disappointing, but this was maybe the best I’d ever had. some chili flake was sprinkled on top. Turkish chili flake, when it’s good, is amazing, but usually when I buy it it’s low quality and not worth it. So I asked the guy about his chili flake, hoping he might tell me that he buys it at a nearby shop. He held up a little shaker of the stuff and said it’s his homemade blend of spices and chili. Good work my dude.

Next we walked around the neighborhood, which, to Lise’s delights, was chock full of thrift shops. We went to all of them, then drove back home.

Belgium 2025 Part 1

 Day one

All of a sudden Lise was like, do you want to go to Belgium? I was like, uh, yeah, sure. So she found a cheap hotel in Bruges. It was the same one we stayed at before. There was nothing stopping us so no real reason not to go. So in a couple of days we were heading north on the A1. For some reason we kept seeing signs warning of a vehicle going in the wrong direction. We never saw it.

I asked Lise if she remembered where to park. The last time, Lise had researched before about where we could leave the car outside of town for a few days. She had forgotten to do that this time, but said we’d figured it out. We drove around a suburban neighborhood for a while, trying to find spots that weren’t limited to four hours. We thought we had found one, but when we looked online later, we found out that the street we were parked on did indeed have a four-hour limit.

On the way into town we crossed through the Smedenpoort, or Donkey’s Gate, an entrance to Bruges that was first built in 1297. It crosses the moat-like canal that nearly completely circles the central part of the city. There is a skull mounted on it that has an interesting backstory. in the late 1600’s the French were invading Bruges, but could not manage to penetrate the well-fortified city. A Belgian traitor offered help to the French in providing intel on how to enter the city. This traitor was found out, executed and had his skull dipped in bronze and hung on the gate as a warning. Somehow the skull went missing during the French Revolution, but was later recovered. Today the skull is a replica.

After checking into our hotel room we went straight to a place I wanted to visit after doing a bit more research on Bruges than last time. It’s a place called the Lucifernum. It’s the home of an eccentric man and his Peruvian wife. It features all sorts of weird and morbid decor and opens during very specific hours on certain days as a kind of bar/museum. The sign outside instructed us to ring the bell. An elderly man in a red robe arrived and with few words summoned us inside. Every inch of the home was filled with obscure nicknacks and decor from the Addams Family. Purple and red lights gave a haunted atmosphere to the space. He led us through a hall and started to explain a bit of how this place works, while instructing us that we must take pictures. Lise didn’t like that at all. We don’t take many pictures and we definitely don’t like being told to do so. It feels manipulative. We arrived at the door of the bar and he explained that we were obligated to have a cocktail for 15 euros as part of the entrance to the home. We didn’t realize that was the deal and he watched us hesitate awkwardly. Trying to ditch my overwhelming anxiety about money, I said, yeah, sure, it’s ok. Lise looked at me and said “are you sure?”. I really didn’t want to pay fifteen for a mojito, even if it included the viewing and photographing of his moody and arguably racist bric-a-brac. Without saying anything, the man was suddenly escorting us back to the front door. I was confused. Had Lise finally said she didn’t want to continue the tour and I hadn’t heard? No, the guy just sensed we weren’t into it and figured it would be better if we didn’t join his party. He was right and we were glad to be out of there. Anyway, we weren’t in Bruges to drink tropical cocktails, we were here for beer. Good beer. Great beer. The best beer.

So we moved onward to The Beer Wall. It’s a touristy bar. It’s maybe the most touristy bar in the city. It’s a place I should avoid. Their beer selection isn’t even that good. However, the location of its outdoor seating right on the canal can’t be beat. A lot of the better bars stock dozens, maybe hundreds of different beers, almost entirely in bottles. This place, though, has just sixteen beers on tap. However, it also functions as a bit of a beer museum with a wall of hundreds of different beers with their accompanying glasses on display as well as a little display of beer memorabilia behind glass by the bathrooms. I ordered the “Fourchette”, said to be a mix of triple and blanche (white/wheat). It was a unique concept and I actually really liked it. Triples can be a little strong, a little intense, but only on a hot summer day would I go for a white beer. This was a nice balance and it kind of makes me want to do my own beer mixing. Lise got a Bourgogne des Flandres. It came from a brewery just next door and she ordered it because we had gone to that brewery last time she had really liked their beer. Unfortunately what she had gotten last time was their Blonde beer, the Blonden OS, and this was a Red/Brown Beer. It was still good. It was another blended beer. It mixed a classic brown ale with a naturally fermented lambic beer. Lambics are quite interesting, but I’m not so into the intense acidity they often have. This blend really hit a nice spot of lightly acidic beer with a rich body and deep flavor. Lise also liked it, but she still would have preferred the blonde.

Bourgogne des Flandres on the left, Fourchette on the right.

 

For the next round, Lise went with the Fourchette and I tried the IPA from the local Blinden Ezel (Blind Donkey) Brewery. Now, I really love my IPA’s from the PNW, but I’ve slowly come to accept that the IPA’s brewed in France, England, Belgium or Spain are just not going to give me that same vibe. No shade, I mean, IPA’s have a weird history and have proliferated around the world so much in the last two decades that I feel like it’s hard to tell what exactly makes an IPA an IPA. The Blind Donkey was still good, but not really what I was hoping for.

Fourchette on the left and the Blinden Ezel IPA on the right

 

A cool water bottle on display at The Beer Wall

We took a short walk to a bar that we hadn’t been to before called ’t Poatersgat. This was one of those semi-hidden spots in a medieval underground with big stone arches. The table had a small binder with the beer menu inside. They had dozens of beers with descriptions next to each one. This made choosing, both easy and difficult. I got a Fils a Papa, a triple aged in rum barrels, which was pretty good. Lise got something called a Wakko from the Brouwerij Tzaweizen (Tzaweizen Brewery). It was a delicious blonde with insane artwork on it. We came across other beers from this brewery at a grocery store and they have a variety of unique and silly art on their labels. It’s some welcome modern personality from a very ancient and sometimes serious beer culture. While we savored our beers a couple was playing darts next to us. It seemed like maybe it was their first time playing darts as most of them ended up on the floor and more than once I saw the woman on the ground, retrieving the darts from under a piece of furniture.

Lise's Wakko on the left and my Fils a Papa from De Leite on the right

On the way home we stopped by the fry stand in the square next to our hotel. We got a couple of baskets of fries and some Bitterballen, a Flemish specialty similar to a croquette, but instead of a gooey bechamel inside, the balls are made of basically a thick, molten beefy stew. We took them back to our room and watc gentlehed some insane German gladiators type of show. Basically, the show pitted two teams of people in peak physical condition against each other in the most underwhelming obstacle course imaginable. These ripped guys and gals were would run through this course without breaking a sweat only to have it conclude with them basically doing a series of the milk bottle knock over carnival game, which left the obstacle course part irrelevant because the final step took way longer. I really think with just being exposed to American television for a couple of decades, I could be a major TV producer in Germany.

Day Two

In the morning I led us on the walking tour from an old Lonely Planet. It was short, not specifically interesting, but it was a nice thing to do and gave us a bit of direction. It’s hard to have a stroll in central Bruges that isn’t stunning. We needed to go back to the car, since we were not in a forever spot. On our way there, it started snowing. We considered staying in Bruges for the snow, but decided it would be better to just get this car trip over with. The plan was a mini road trip to the coast, which is only like 20 miles from Bruges. On the way we stopped in the small town of Damme. It’s in guidebooks and tourists go there, but we didn’t really see the draw. It was a much more important spot like 500 years ago when Damme was a port town connecting Bruges to the sea via canals. The canals (or rivers?) eventually silted up and left Bruges unreachable by the seafaring vessels, leaving this Damme town completely irrelevant. There’s a couple of interesting buildings and even some very fancy restaurants, but we lingered for a matter of minutes, bought some nice rye bread and got back in the car. It was cold, windy and gray and we had little desire to brave more of this weather for the town of Damme than we had to. We made sandwiches in the car with a condiment I’d just bought called “Belgian pickles”. It was basically a copy of English Piccalilli, which is actually an English attempt to recreate Indian pickles. Weird. Anyway, it was pretty good on the cheese sandwich. Onward to the coast, we passed through ugly boulevards lined with car dealerships and big gaudy restaurants. The seaside town, near the main port wasn’t much to look at and we didn’t even bother to walk on the wind ravaged beach. We drove through the port area where we were dwarfed by the massive infrastructure surrounding us and headed back to Bruges.

It was still kinda snowing, maybe a 50/50 rain snow mix, but I tried to pretend we were in a medieval winter wonderland. I thought maybe we could get cozy and pop into a cafe for a hot chocolate or even a beer. We passed a place on the outskirts of town that we should have stopped at, but instead we ended up in the center at a bar we’d been to on our first trip here called “Bar des Amis”. We sat down at a nice little cozy window seat so we could watch the snow fall and the passersby pass by. As I looked for the menu, I saw a QR code on the table. I went and asked the bartender if we could have a menu. He told me to use the QR code. Well, I don’t have a smart phone and don’t want to live in a world where I have to have one, so we left. Just more of my nose-cutting and face-spiting. Whatever. We ended up just going back to the room so Lise could take a nap. I  was happy to just sit and chill too.

After our siesta, we headed over to ’t Brugs Beertje (that’s The Bruges Bear, not The Bruges Beer) a very famous bar that I had kind of low expectations for. It topped every list of the best bars in the city so I figured it would be brimming with obnoxious tourists. I was completely wrong. The atmosphere was gentle and reserved. It felt rustic and mildly sophisticated with zero pretension. Most notably, it was quiet, except for the whisper of classical music. This was where I first noticed the Belgian Bar Ballet/Pop dichotomy. Every bar had one of two soundtracks. It was either classical/ballet music (I don’t know if those genres are completely distinct or if they overlap, but I heard things from Swan Lake, Nutcracker as well as Vivaldi and his ilk), or international pop hits from the past forty years. Songs that everybody in the world knows. Your U2 hits, 99 Luftballoons, Celine Dion, Hey Ya, you get the idea. So ’T Brugs Beertje was decidedly a Ballet Bar. Probably half the customers were indeed tourists from either the UK or America, but the rest were just your typical locals. The server, a soft spoken guy with tattooed arms and a ponytail, disappeared underground as he searched for the beers we had selected from their binder full of beers. I got the Liefman’s Goudenband, a really unique aged brown beer that was high on acidity and had some nice fruitiness to it. Definitely right up my alley on a cold snowy (slushy) evening. It’s also not the most obscure beer, so I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for it in the future. We were probably the youngest people in the bar. Two British women, clearly in town for the beer,  sat at a nearby table discussing the subtle notes of prune or red chili they were detecting from the beers they were sampling. An elderly man with a cane and clothes that were probably quite smart at some point, but were now faded and slightly rumpled, walked in and sat down at what looked like his usual spot. He sat there and proceeded to silently drink at least three beers poured from flip-top bottles. The beer was served in a peculiar glass that had long stem and a rim that wasn’t parallel to the table, but was at a 30 degree angle. I later looked it up and it was a Paix-Dieu, a strong Belgian triple clocking in at 10%. A guy sitting at the next table asked him if he was from around here and the guy just muttered that yeah, he’s from here and lives just down the street.  We ordered a second beer. I got a Basilius, a brew from Bruges named in honor of one of the local churches. Lise got something called a Judith, a “Specialty Grain” beer, from the ’T Brugs Bierinstituut.  The specialty grain seems to be rye…? We weren’t too impressed by this beer and we wondered what The Bruges Beer Institute was, and hypothesized they were letting the Beer students make the beer. I mean, it wasn’t bad, but just not as good or interesting as many of those that we had.

 

The Judith and the Basilius

We made our way through the quiet streets of Bruges to a place we had been to the last time. One of the best bars I’ve ever been to. Another underground bar in a 13th century cellar. This neighborhood was apparently a big spot for coopers, barrel makers, and this cellar was a storage space for their barrels. It was discovered back in 1973 while the house that sat on top of it was demolished. Now they serve over a hundred fifty beers while a DJ spins corny pop tunes under the stone arches and faint light of a dim chandelier. It was a bit less atmospheric than I remembered it, maybe because the last time we had been here it was almost empty. This time there were enough people to give the place the vibe of a bar, but not so many that it got obnoxious or crowded. I got a Trappist Tripel from La Trappe Brewery. I’m not sure why, in hindsight. I’m pretty sure I can get that at my local grocery store. Lise got a Kappitel Blonde, from a well known brewery in Watou, Belgium. We had actually stopped at Watou to buy some groceries during a road trip years ago. I had had no idea that the place has at least a few really important breweries at the time. To me it looked like just a depressing little one street border town with absolutely nothing going. The beers were good, but not really any surprises here. For my second beer I ordered something a bit lighter, the Saison Dupont. This trendsetting beer originating in the mid 19th century is meant for drinking in warm weather and provided a template for summer beers henceforth. Unfortunately I was served the organic version, which apparently is a bit different from the original, so I didn’t get the real deal. Lise got the Grand Cru, a nice strong beer from the St. Feuillen Brewery. At this point I was a bit beyond the point of noticing the subtleties in the beers so my commentary shall cease here. 

 

La Trappe and The Kappitel Blonde

 

International Beer Memorabilia

St. Feuillen Grand Cru and the Organic Saison Dupont

We headed back home with an obligatory stop at the fry stand. We shared an order of fries while Lise got bitterballen and I got a Bicky Burger, something I’d been kinda waiting for for a long time. I’d had this uniquely Flemish fast food once a few years ago, and was shocked by how much I liked it. It’s a burger with a patty that contains multiple meats including horse (traditionally), and is deep fried instead of cooked on a griddle. The condiments include crispy fried onions and mustard. This time it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Either one of the condiments was missing or it’s just one of those things where I’d built it up in my head over the years.