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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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