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.

Rest assured, I won’t attempt one of my verbose abstractions for the jaw-dropping city of Paris. I wouldn’t know where to start; plus I think the name alone carries enough imagery to validate our excitement towards immersing ourselves in this mecca of culture. We spent a week trying to experience as much as we could but of course we didn’t even scratch the surface. There’s enough art, architecture, food, history, design, and ambiance drenching the streets to keep Parisians (and jobless nomad travelers) busy purging themselves with sophistication their whole lives.

In the interest of time I’ll simply state that the major sites (Louvre, Orsay, Pompidou, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and Versailles) all exceded my expectations and provided massive amounts of entertainment. Lauren has been to Paris before so she knew what to expect, but was nevertheless further delighted. Besides those standard Paris experiences there were also a few other memorable events worth recounting.

We started our first night right with none other than Andrew Melodramatic Vickers. We all enjoyed some €4 wine, talked about how much we had missed each other, and then embarked on a search for cheap (<$10) drinks and cool Parisian bars. We came upon a club under a bridge but the cover was too steep and it was under a bridge, so we opted for the sixth street-esque bar district of Paris. There we found the cool bars with cheap drinks and Andrew's French skills facilitated the mingling with some locals. The next day Andrew lead us to a falafel place his Aunt had recommended that turned out to have the best falafels in Europe. From then on L'Aus du Falafel was the source of at least 40% of our food consumption. It was conveniently located in our favorite part of town – the Jewish neighborhood. Our Paris Servas hosts were the Akakpos; wife Ann-Cecile, husband Olivier, and baby David. Ann-Cecile hails from Brittany in western France and Olivier grew up in Togo in West Africa (hence the name Akakpo.) It’s not every day you meet someone from Togo, so we had a lot of questions for him. When Ann-Cecile isn’t mothering her incessantly happy child David, she is teaching at the local elementary school. She invited us to drop in on the English lesson of a couple classes one day and we eagerly agreed. We showed up a little early and were unexpectedly mobbed by 50 chattering little French people. Ann-Cecile told us it would be good if we could think of a simple song to teach the kids because they had recently learned “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles. All we could think to teach them was good ‘ol “Eyes of Texas.” The words might have been a little too difficult for them, but they definitely caught on to the corresponding hand gesture. Before all the singing there was a lengthy Q&A session where Lauren and I fielded questions like “Are there airplanes in your city?” from the 7 yr. olds and “Have you been on reality TV?” from the much wiser 9 yr. olds. Ann-Cecile and Olivier were awesome hosts who patiently answered all of our questions. Baby David is only 5 months old, so we interrogated Ann-Cecile about the details of her pregnancy healthcare and maternity leave to compare with Michael Moore’s depiction of the French healthcare system in his film Sicko. She hadn’t seen the movie and probably thought we had some weird neonatal preoccupation.

Unfortunately, a lot of the facts didn’t match up and it sounds like having a baby/receiving medical care in France isn’t quite as dreamy as Michael would have us believe. Still, Ann-Cecile didn’t have any complaints and her healthcare experience sounded pretty impressive. Let’s just say I would recommend delivering a baby in France over the US, but there was no sign of any magical nannies running around doing people’s laundry for free.

Other memorable moments include being stopped in our tracks by the 6 o’clock Eiffel tower light show while marching around the top floor of the transparent Pompidou, touring the infamous architectural promenade scheme of Villa LaRoche by French architect Le Corbusier, and entering the Italian Renaissance wing of the Louvre in search of the Mona Lisa to find what might as well have been the little Italy of Paris with endless Italians huddled around their handiwork.

We barely made it out of Paris on the 14th when all hell broke loose thanks to the French ninnies of the rail workers union that can’t handle a few extra years of work. With a stroke of luck, and a death-defying leap into oncoming traffic by me and all my baggage, we managed to flag down the only available cab in Paris and were able to catch our train to Belgium.

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