Donde Esta La Biblioteca? Otra Vez

With a couple days to spare between Paris and Amsterdam, we went to the little Belgian town of Brugge to stay with Servas hosts Luk, Lieve, and their 3 kids. It’s unreal how many cultures are crammed into Europe. Brugge is only 3 hours north of Paris by train, but it couldn’t feel more different. French changes to Flemish, croissants to waffles, crepes to chocolate, and secular wine to sacred beer.

After a nice orientation by Luk and Lieve, we set out to explore their “Venice of the North.” The city depends mostly on tourism for its industry so you can imagine how cutesy everything is. We joked as we were looking down on Brugge from the top of the bell tower that everything looked exactly like those ceramic house scenes people buy as Christmas decorations.

We saw one of the few Michelangelo statues to ever leave Italy during the Renaissance at the Church of Our Lady. Like the Renaissance wing of the Louvre, it too was surrounded by crowds of Italians. We also toured a local brewery and learned a lot about Belgian beer. A few things I learned that I used to just pretend I knew is the difference between abbey beer, trappist beer, and dubbel, trippel, and quadruple malts.

Abbey beer is brewed in an “abbey,” which nowadays means that a big company interested in heightened marketability has purchased the name of a beer that used to be brewed in an abbey, but now brews it in regular commercial breweries. Trappist beer is more legit. It’s brewed by trappist monks in a monastery the way it has been since back when beer was the only liquid safe to drink. That’s where dubbel (Flemish for double,) trippel (triple,) and quadruple come in. Single malts were for peasants, or “for when you are just thirsty” as Luk put it. Dubbel malts use twice the amount of malted grains per ounce of water than single malts which means there is more sugar for the yeast to turn into alcohol. Thus, they were more expensive and reserved for the clergy. Trippel means three times the malt/alcohol/expense so only nobility could touch those. Our guide jested that the quadruple brews went straight to the Pope.

Most Belgian beers are dubbel or trippel that start out ranging from 6-9% alcohol and it only goes up from there. We saw some brews that got up to 12%! You Oklahomans may have won the Red River Shoot Out, but that 3.5% beer you were drinking during the game is what they serve the kid’s table at Belgian celebrations.

Luk and Lieve are by far the most traveled of all the Servas hosts we’ve had (or maybe the most traveled people in the world.) They dissected every continent except Africa during their 2-year trek around the world back in the early ‘90s. That wasn’t enough, however, and after a year break they set out again for another 9 months. More recently they un-enrolled their 3 kids for a semester and spent 4 months traveling as a family in South America. We talked at length about all of their experiences and they even dug out the old projector and screen to show us the slideshow of their incredible journey (which was 2 hours long.)

Luk and Lieve are also very involved with Oxfam, grow a good portion of the food they eat, and use only bicycles and public transportation. If they lived in the US they would be flamboyant hippies, but in Belgium/Northern Europe they merely blend in with the crowd. It was hard leaving the comfort of their 100-year old house and delicious vegetarian cooking, but we had to continue north to meet up Andrew Vickers for the last time in yet another entirely different world: Amsterdam.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.