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.