One Beer to Rule Them All

...and in my mouth bind them

Look at that, a title this week. Can you tell I'm in a good mood? I have good news and bad news for yall. First, the positive: yall thought I forgot about this bitch, but I'm back and dropping some more Euro knowledge for ya. Despite the fact that I'm currently dripping with sweat and suffering the emotional pain of finishing my last day at the Parliament in Brussels. I've even littered it with helpful links throughout for the less enlightened among you. Bad news is my camera is gone, so don't hold your breath for pics. The only certainty is that it's somewhere in Luxembourg. Now let's never speak of it or what drunk me tweeted about it again.

(P.S. even the random internet cafe I'm typing this in still produced a Chimay Bleu for me. I'm gonna miss this country.)

Lots in my notes for this week. Had some more sweet delegation at the Parliament, including one headed by the speaker of Tunisia's new Constituent Assembly, one Mustapha Ben Jafar. Guy looks about as Tunisian as my uncle and is more belligerent than my uncle after eight Pilsners to boot. Still, the guy is obviously pretty canny if he manuevered himself into one of the top government jobs post-revolution, and he's not having any of these questions about potential Salafist entrenchment in the constitution or amnesty for the ancien regime. Like always, I am a paragon of focus and diligence and am faithfully taking notes for the Zeller. The girl beside me is morally bankrupt and texting the whole time, only keeping pace by copying my pristine information. Now I know how the Chans and Lees of the world feel. So I start writing random ahit in the middle of my notes to fuck with her. Something like:

-1/4 of budget devoted to social programs
-stresses need to address regional inequalities
-demands "All Power to the Soviets"
-insists that sharia law will not be incorporated into new constitution
-says instead all non-believers will be forced to drive Toyota Priuses

A note about the translators here. Generally they do a pretty damn good job at translating from 20-odd languages on the fly direct into English. They were working overtime this day handling Arabic, too. One thing you don't immediately realize is that they have to get the tone of the speech right, too. Occasionally you get one who's having an off day and uses a happy, lighthearted tone while he's describing rampant organ thievery in Kosovo. Free kidneys for everyone under 12!

It's funny how the Germans view this country, too. Jan finds it bizarre that I enjoy Brussels at all and says if he couldn't fly back to Germany every weekend he would commit. According to him the beer here is all made with the wrong ingredients and unfit for human consumption, too. Not the first time I've been indirectly called a pig. Me and Joanna were having a convo about culture shock and anything that might be throwing me off in Belgium. I tell her it's basically been cool (as if Western Europe was really going to be more jarring than a country that wrestles its camels) and that the only thing that's really pissed me off is the absurd opening hours of all the shops here, with nothing open past 6 or on Sundays. She gives me a look of exasperated understanding and we bond as we spend the next ten minutes bitching about the insanity of it all. I'm starting to love the Deutsch.

By the next morning my computer is so far removed from working condition I have no choice but to take it in. Someone needs to smack those bloody Japanese around. I fire off a quick Ipod email to Joanna to let her know I'll be late. Below is the text word-for-word:

Hello Mrs. [name redacted],

Just letting you know I'll be in around 11 today. I need to take my computer in and the nearest shop is only open from 10 to 6. Fucking Belgians, am I right?

Regards,
Neil

At least that's what I typed up prior to discovering that the internet was out, too. But you still laughed. I think I went in and probably did some stuff after. There's no way we can be sure. Visited another sick lambic brewery on Friday and picked up some goodies. My wallet hurts.

Saturday, and that means traveling time. Brace yourself Ypres. I initially planned on using my amazing morning skills to start my day at 8 30. Somehow this became 9 30, then 11, and by the time I finally dragged my ass out of bed it was damn near noon. Oops. Guess I won't be biking around the Salient today. The massive WWI museum stops taking visitors at 5 pm, so I scramble through the hotel check-in and make it there with ten minutes to spare. Only to discover that it's getting renovated until next Saturday. I think the only Dutch word I've learned here is GESLOTEN - CLOSED. At least the service for all the fallen Canadians in the evening is still pretty dope. Respect.

No avoiding the biking on Sunday. Today's target, Westvleteren Abbey, is out in the countryside far from any public transit and well out of walking distance. If you want the world's best beer, you have to work for it. Somehow I'm still pretty bad at this whole traveling thing, and for some reason I elected to bring only the pair of jeans I was wearing Thursday with me. I'm not even sure why I bought these things - they barely fit me after fasting for twelve hours and are so skinny you'd think I was a diehard My Chemical Romance fan. You'd actually be close, my brother is. The fucking jeans would probably fit him a lot better, too. I briefly consider cutting them into denim shorts Tobias Funke style, but decide instead to just become an incredibly chafed human being. There are dozens of us!

On the seventh day, God looked at Belgium and gave it a once-over with a meat tenderizer, so the whole country is flat as fuck. It's like he knew I wouldn't have exercised for four months before coming here. I rip across to the abbey in an hour flat. I've been anticipating this moment for years months weeks and am literally tingling with excitement. Maybe I can even get one of the monks to sprinkle some of his dandruff in my beer and make it that much more authentic. Sit down, order up and I'm presented with a glistening amber chalice. My first ever pint of Westvleteren 12 looks every bit as refined as I'd imagined. Even the head looks like something you'd get on your knees to drink out of the gutter. And my fuck does it ever deliver. The taste is like Rochefort 10 (the world's second best beer, in my unquestionable opinion) on steroids. I could sit here spouting adjectives that most of you can't really relate to for the next ten minutes, but I'll just let Ratebeer do the talking. If I had to describe it in one sentence, it would be like the resurrection of Christ in your mouth (no homo). Totally fucking awesome. Book the next flight to Belgium and see for yourself.

Initially I'd planned on hitting the nearby De Struise brewery, another total beauty, later that day. After an 8, a Blonde and a double dip in the 12, my legs have other ideas. I'm lucky to stumble to the shop, only to find out they won't sell me a single bottle to take home. Lucky for them I left my Uzi in my other pants. With great focus and determination I make it back to town, slam a couple litres of water, sample some more regional specialties and make it back to Brussels. Without even losing anything. I wish that wasn't as impressive as it is.

I'm still soaked in my suit and getting thirsty. Plus I gotta change in time to watch the Germans annihilate the dirty broke Italians in an hour. Factor in getting stuck in the elevator for another half hour and I better head out now. If you're lucky and I can't make more friends I might type another entry next week in Strasbourg. Until then go outside, or something.

Christmas came early, kids. You thought I had forgotten about this bitch. You were wrong. My ASUS bit the dust two weeks into my trip, just as I hit the end credits of the Game of Thrones season two finale (thank you Scott and Krista, cause that show fucking owns). But since I love you all so much, I just parked my ass at a greasy computer gaming cafe for the express purpose of updating you all on my life. With great focus, Red Bull and drum and bass I'm resisting the temptation to join the crowd playing Magic: the Gathering to translate my notes from my Ipod onto here. I might even get through my world's-best-beer and Antwerp entries today. You can save any awards until I get home.

Let's pick up with the second week. This week the Parliament is holding its plenary session in Strasbourg. All the members and most of the assistants are there. I am not. Neither are Mr. Zeller's assistants Jan and Joanna, and they tell me I can hole up in his office for the week and basically stream the session, read articles and chill. But I was looking forward to soul-crushing clerical work! The office itself is pretty dope: top floor, and Zeller has all sorts of cool shit from Central Asia, travel guides to the Congo and Taiwan, dictionaries for Deutsch-Polish, -Japanese, and -Bulgarian, plus lots of other shit. I also notice some reports from the election monitoring he did in Algeria, Tajikistan and the DRC. Guy gets around.

Tuesday starts off boring, but the Strasbourg plenary has a pretty sweet debate. The European Parliament is interesting in that it faces the challenge of reconciling 753 members and the dozens of national parties they represent into coherent political groups. To this end the various MEPs coalesce into ideologically-based groups and coordinate policies along these lines. Thankfully the guy I'm working for is sane and a member of the centre-right European People's Party, which is also the biggest group. As you'd expect most of the parliamentarians are happy to jerk each other off about how harmoniously end-of-history their European integration project is, but about one in ten is an asshole Euroskeptic. Most of these guys are Brits and fucking funny, too. The best one is Nigel Farage, who leads a UK party that basically demands tearing up every multilateral treaty the country has ever signed. Smart guy, too. His speech this day was brilliant. Check it out.

I typed up a huge polemic on the merits and drawbacks of the EU back when I thought I'd be updating this every couple days, but it's taken me a half hour to type all this shit so I'm just gonna move into the second sweet five-day weekend in a row. I had long ago bought a ticket to the Netsky show Friday night, because who doesn't like Belgian drum and bass live in the sweetest venue in Brussels? Searching for other random nearby concerts, however, I stumbled upon something far sweeter. Judas Priest, finishing their last ever world tour. In London. On Saturday. Ten minutes and way too many euros later and I have a ticket, a round trip on a train and two nights in a hostel with a 24-hour bar in the basement. I really hate Europe.

There's so painfully little going on at the Parliament that they give me Thursday off, too. Who said the Germans aren't merciful? I hit the Cantillon brewery for some epic lambics, basically beers that are brewed using only wild yeast from the air and are stored and age like wines. Much more on them in a future entry. Friday arrives and I head down to the Ancienne Belgique dead in the old town heart of Brussels. This is the guy's homecoming show, so he brings out the big guns: a live band with a keyboardist, a drummer on a Roland kit (this could have been you, Eric Chiang) and an MC. Five Duvels and two hours of insane drum and bass later I can't hear anything except my heart in my ears and I look like I just got out of the pool.

No rest for the wicked and I'm fighting my way through British customs early the next day. Black woman at the counter gives me the business about not having a copy of the receipt for the hostel I booked online or my flight back to Calgary fucking two months later. Am I visiting England or East Germany? The bitch's best efforts still can't stop me from showing up at the Hammersmith Apollo just as the first opener heads on. Decent enough. Saxon follows them. Old school New Wave of British Heavy Metal dudes that I never listened to, but they have some crunchy riffs. Pretty impressed. Spot a guy inexplicably wearing an Oilers jersey. I guess failure transcends continents. The lights go down, I chat with a British dude about dirty continentals and it's time.

The Metal Gods come out with all guns blazing. Immediately rip into some classic British Steel before spreading out into all eras of Priestly goodness. Even standing at the very back of the sweltering arena I'm still covered in goosebumps. Rob Halford is ten times better than he was at the 2005 show, nailing every high note on Painkiller and all the rest. This can't get any better. Then come the first few notes of The Sentinel, the best Priest song of all time. Fuck it, the best metal song of all time. The best song of best song time ever. Rocked out like I was in the first row, and in a couple months if you really squint you'll be able to see for yourselves, because just before the last song the drummer comes up and announces they've been filming the show for a DVD. I drop twenty euros on probably the coolest fucking band shirt I own at the merch stand and head back to the hostel to get lit. Fifteen-year-old me would be so proud.

Pretty normal college kid tourist shit for the rest of the weekend. Made it till 5 am that night drinking with some beauties from Chicago and some other kids. Walked around the city until my ass was too chafed to continue and fleeced some Hungarians at poker for twenty whole pounds. Pretty sure there was a Sunday, too. Who knows. Do you really want to read another three paragraphs about the fucking zoo? Check out the sweet pics I'm about to facebook. Please.

EDIT: Even Batman needs Robin sometimes (no homo). Big ups to my boy ET for suggesting the Cantillon tour, because apparently the quiet satisfaction of knowing it himself wasn't good enough.

Live, Learn, and Never Trust Dirty Fucking Slovenians

After a long week of killing brain cells I'm finally back in a writing mood again. The fact that I just tossed on one of my favorite Netsky mixes (seeing him next Friday, what up!) and cracked a La Trappe Quadrupel isn't hurting either. If you've ever wanted to live Belgium vicariously through a jackass, strap yourself in.

Let's pick up where we left off. Sunday was pretty lackluster, but I did make it down to Brussels' waterfront district. By 'waterfront district' I mean 'overpriced seafood restaurant central'. It turns out ninety percent of the stores and restaurants here are closed on Sundays, too, something that the ones remain open are definitely aware of. A decent meal of waterzooi runs me thirty euros and adds an element of frustration to my thirst. Thank God there's a place with 40 different brews on draught a little ways down the road. I'm most intrigued by the one labelled 'Band of Brothers S01E01' but decide Goebbels and Goering can stay out of my drinking life.

First day of work arrives. Even the jet lag waking me up three hours early isn't enough to get myself sorted in time, and I repeatedly cut myself shaving and barely make my train on time. As in, I book it to the station and jam one arm in the door to force my way in. I am nothing if not consistent. At least this job gives me an excuse to rock an Italian suit for eight hours a day. P Diddy WISHES he could wake up feeling like I look. Arriving at the Parliament itself is a bit on an experience: the place is fucking huge. I don't know what I expected with about 10,000 Eurocrats in one building, but this looks like the sort of place Palpatine would feel at home at. My role here is to help out one Mr. Zeller, a Member of the European Parliament, but as he's in Poland keeping a foot on those peoples' throats I meet up with his two full-time assistants instead. They lead me to some sort of info session that only succeeds in going further and further over my head, with the most memorable detail being the fact that waiters serve you coffee and mineral water every hour or so. Things really get kickstarted in the afternoon when I get assigned to take notes on the Committee on Foreign Affairs session. The committee chamber is swarming with MEPs, media and all sorts of people more important than me as we take in first a session on a full week's worth of coups, rebellions and ethnic conflicts across Africa. You know how you always see those videos of UN sessions where the representatives of each country are wearing headphones and getting the speeches translated into their own language live? Yeah. We have those. One of the English translators sounds identical to David Attenborough. I keep expecting him to lapse into a description of penguin mating habits in the middle of explaining the military coup in Guinea-Bissau, but he disappoints. An Albanian delegation featuring the foreign minister and deputy PM (picture below) also gives a self-congratulatory conference on their progress towards EU integration. I have never had such a huge poli sci boner. This bodes very well.

Tuesday involves much of the same. It's pretty clear the two assistants don't really know what to do with me, but this entails me showing up at 10 am and spending all day attending conferences on the Timoshenko trial in Ukraine and watching movies on things like human rights in Chechnya, so I'm all smiles. The most exciting part of the day comes when I'm informed that there's really nothing for me to do on Wednesday at all, so I can go ahead and make my weekend a full five days. The new deputy PM of Libya is giving a conference on his country's upcoming first-ever elections. He's pretty positive about their situation and cites the nice stat that they managed to register over two million voters (out of a population of six million) in two weeks. Knowing the rest of the story, I'm more skeptical about the prospects for successful democratizing a country where the majority of the population is angry, unemployed young men, each of whom has his own tribal loyalty and a Kalashnikov to back it up. Sounds like another state I know *cough*AFGHANISTAN*cough*. A week in is probably too early to start hammering foreign delegates, however, so I let the rebels and NATO hacks jerk each other off some more before calling it quits for the week.

My plans for the weekend are initially pretty grand, and they start off well. Wednesday morning I book a hostel in Ghent and head up to Flanders for the weekend. On the train there I'm subjected to my first real experience listening to Dutch. I consider myself pretty open-minded, but god damn if that isn't one disgusting sounding language. It sounds like a chimpanzee trying to read a German textbook with a mouthful of Skittles, and every four or five syllables he chokes on one and produces this wretched guttural noise. Despite this, Ghent is a pretty impressive city and I even find myself doing something I never thought possible: appreciating artwork. I spend half the day wandering the city and the other half downing Belgian beers before stopping in at my hostel, which, being a Wednesday, is pretty dead. There's only one other guy in the room with me, so I try and make friends with him. He's apparently Slovenian despite looking more like Castro than any Slav I've ever seen, and we manage a broken conversation in Russian. I have no worries. I go to sleep. Silly me.

I wake up around nine. The Slovenian is gone, but I think nothing of it. I shower. I eat breakfast. I start packing my things. I check my wallet. Weird, it's empty. I check it again. That's funny, I could have sworn I had about three hundred euros in it. Oh wait. I DID. Unless they ascended to the Promised Land last night there's only one possibility. I am seeing red. I can barely breathe. Too bad I left the nuclear launch codes in my other pants. This dirty, sleazy, communist motherfucker fished my wallet out of my jeans and robbed me blind as I slept not six inches away. I talk to the hostel owner, get his name and passport number and file a police report, but unfortunately real life is not a Nicholas Cage movie and there's not much else I can do. But mark my words, Rafael Roman, Slovenian passport number 116516: if I ever find you I will flay you alive with a potato peeler and drink every drop of your greasy, Stalin-fucking communist blood.

The rest of the weekend is very pleasant. I make my way to Bruges and spend an afternoon sipping rare beers and enjoying some good conversation with some people who aren't fucking assholes. This includes a former American senator (according to him, at any rate) and a sweet Danish couple. Friday was more beer in Bruges, and today revolved around a trip to the Delirium cafe in central Brussels. Obviously any place serving 2000+ different brews was high on my list, and the rest of the clientele was pretty decent, especially the Russian girl I ended up chatting with. I was thoroughly enjoying our conversation and got a couple chances to look smarter than I really am by dropping some slick Russian phrases, but the emotionless Soviet mother on the other side of her didn't seem to find the hammer and sickle on my shirt very amusing. I thought everyone enjoyed dictatorships of the proletariat? Either way I'm tired and going to stop enlightening you all now. Tune in next week when I fix the Eurozone debt crisis.

After a very long hiatus, it's time to revive this bitch. Somehow I only ended up covering the first two weeks of my last trip despite writing enough to fill half a book. During the rest of my semester abroad I visited the Black Sea, Ephesus, Georgia (the country, not the state), Chernobyl/Pripyat, La Tomatina and some other places, but I'm pretty sure everyone's done that shit so I won't bore you with the details.

Anyways, as I'm sure you're all aware I've tricked enough people into thinking I can handle an internship at the European Parliament to be rewarded with one this summer. This involved the ever-pleasant task of a ten-hour flight across the Atlantic, so I started into that Wednesday night. After the nightmare of my last trans-Atlantic flight (see previous post) there was nowhere to go but up. At least this one had a couple good in-flight movie options, i.e. Contraband. Damn good flick if you haven't seen it. Then again, they could film Marky Mark picking fucking azaleas for two hours and I'd still be on the edge of my seat watching it, so your mileage may vary. This time around I decide to slay the beast that is jet lag by not once closing my eyes until I'm settled in my hotel room. Cue ominous foreshadowing music here. I kill the rest of the air time with The Ides of March (also great) and various bullshit, fight through a couple brutal hours in Heathrow while my flight is delayed and finally make it to Brussels around 8 pm local time. There's maybe five minutes in my hotel room before I pass out, and with the state I'm in I sleep for a full twelve hours and awake feeling like a million bucks.

Just kidding. I wake up at 2 am after maybe five hours of shut-eye and scumbag brain decides that's it for rest. The next few hours are spent bent over my computer in a state that can only be loosely described as 'awake' before the breakfast buffet opens. This is seriously one of the perks of the parentals forcing me to book at the Marriott, as it's just outstanding. The importance of breakfast can hardly be overstated. Miss out on it and you might as well sit your ass down and go back to bed, because you've fucked yourself for the entire day. I am a firm believer that access to quality breakfast twenty-four hours a day is one of the hallmarks of the first world, but as this one's only available for five I make sure to hit it twice.

After this I make my way to the flat I'll be renting for the next two months. Let me take a moment to emphasize what a colossal achievement it is to lock down long-term accommodations in a city eight time zones removed from yours with barely two weeks of notice. My final living arrangements were only secured after fighting through endless Belgian Craiglist scams (no, I won't wire you 900 euros in advance, especially when you having the typing skills of a Nigerian prince) and an all-nighter calling across the pond again and again. So it's to my great relief when I finally show up at this place and the owner is the nice old Belgian lady she had claimed to be. The flat is classy, spacious and offers a panoramic view of Brussels. The woman I'm living with has been almost everywhere I have (and then some) and has an international relations degree. This could work out.

I get shit settled, get a tour of the neighbourhood and, despite the fact I've had five hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, decide to explore a bit. I hop on a train downtown and head in the general direction of the Old Town. I have little idea what I'm doing or where I'm going, but a couple random side streets later I stumble into the middle of Grand Place. I'll admit I'm usually into more exotic landmarks, but this one is nothing short of stunning. The picture really does it little justice. I gawk like a tourist for a few minutes and continue on. Still wandering without any real purpose, my thirst starts to catch up to me and I grab a streetside table at a random pub to explore the most important aspect of Belgium: the beer. The list here includes a number of the legendary Trappists, so obviously I dive right in.

Nothing could have possibly prepared me. My first choice, Orval, hits it out of the park. Light, flavorful and incredibly smooth, this is the kind of beer that makes you forget about your wife, kids and restraining order. Maybe Jesus did turn water into wine, but only because he wasn't able to turn it into Orval. I have a glass of Rochefort 10 next: equally superb, and Westmalle Triple falls only just short. It's now raining, I'm wearing shorts and the two Belgians I'm crammed between are doing their best to give me secondhand lung cancer, but I barely notice. I have entered a plane of Nirvana Gandhi himself could barely wrap his shriveled prune head around. Forget any earlier worries I had about being tempted to slam these like any normal beer: if you could even bring yourself to some sort of Belgian beer deity would kill you where you sat. In each you can taste only the faintest hint of alcohol, which is a damned good thing; it leaves room for a massive range of flavours I never knew beer could have. In the middle of this a guy ambles up and starts playing 'Hava Nagila' on accordion. The definition of happiness is written from ear to ear across my face. I think I am going to like Belgium very, very much.

Today was pretty low-key too. Walked around the European Union institutions a bit to kill some time until it was a more socially acceptable time to start expanding my hops horizons. Dipped back into the Rochefort pool, checked off my fourth amazing Trappist with Chimay Blue and added Duvel and the cherry-flavored Kriek to the tally. I haven't even made any friends yet and I've managed to get half-drunk by myslef in the most enjoyable way possible twice. I could write for years about these beers. I cut my wallet off and head home to start making other people jealous of these phenomenal brews.

PS I wish you could intravenous Belgian beers directly to my brain. Jesus fucking reptile Christ are they ever good.