I am still alive. However, it seems that I accidentally conducted my own Walden-esque experiment by passing the summer in a town that didn’t believe in supporting a reliable telecommunications infrastructure. Why use the Internet when the party telephone line at the local inn works more efficiently at sharing news than email? (True story.)

Besides, the need for modern day communication winnows to nothing when you’re surrounded by beauty like this when you leave your apartment.

The more I connected with Skagway, the less pressure I felt to stay up-to-date on all things non-Alaskan. The lifestyle and attitudes of the people in town were more compelling than any I remembered in the small town America where I grew up. It’s a place of people living a different type of American Dream, the type where they have the ability to get-up and get-gone when they want, and the ability to pull together as a community at a drop of a hat.

It’s the type of town that produces a newspaper only once a week and features a column called “Heard on the Wind.” Locals mainly use it as a release valve during the summer months from living a bizarre reality version of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. From May to the end of September, native Skagwegians are asked the same questions by cruise ship passengers every single day. At first the questions are charming – “What do you do in the winter?” “How in the world did you end up here?” “How much snow do you get?” “What’s an…you? Loo? You-li?”*

After a month it becomes a mental exercise to stay convivial and welcoming as well meaning, curious people ask the same questions that the similarly well-meaning, curious people asked yesterday. You need a place to share stories like this:

“Another person at the same shack later in the week asked, “How far is Russia from here?”

When told by the tour seller that it was about 2,500 miles, the visitor responded, “Then I guess we can’t see it from here.”

This drew a very grim reaction from the tour shack attendants.

The visitor, sensing the obvious, stated, ‘I didn’t want to bring up Sarah Palin, but…’

‘It’s better that you didn’t.’

Speaking of Sarah, where is she? Her reality TV show never came to Skagway-Dyea to hike the Chilkoot Trail a couple summers ago, and we felt dissed. It will soon be prime time on the trail, where the wind also blows up on occasion. Maybe we’ll find her there since election season is upon us, and there are all kinds of metaphors you can use around the themes gold rush and stampede for Facebook updates. Perfect for the twist and shout. The windy one can’t wait. In the meantime, while we wait for Sarah’s return to her original Alaska home,** you can send us wind in the usual manner. Dress it up in red, white and blue and drop it off at the News Depot, where we are always feeling independent and free.”

The town police blotter in the newspaper introduces other elements of life in Skagway too, with weekly incident reports that read with the pull of a Closeau whodunit. There are regular reports like “Police responded to a dispute among roommates. Both ladies suffered injuries during mutual combat. One agreed to spend the night elsewhere” or “A suspicious circumstance was reported in a resident’s yard. The center of a wood pile was found hollowed out. Officer was unable to tell if the center had been stolen, or if the wood had merely been piled high to build a fort. It was odd that it could have been done during the day or night without anyone seeing or hearing it. The pile is not particularly stable enough to hold a large person.”

The Skagway News is not winning any hard hitting journalism awards, but its ability to inform and teach about Skagway was enough to help this outsider feel slightly more connected to the people around her. At the very least, it has made reading the local news in the Lower 48 seem a lot more dull. It’s a good thing I have the Internet again.

* This refers to an ulu, a traditional arctic utility knife.  Traditionally made from whale or walrus jaw bone and now stainless steel, it has been the everyday Arctic women’s knife because of its versatility.  It’s still widely used throughout Alaska.

** One of the first towns the Palins lived in when they first moved to Alaska was Skagway.  This is both a source of pride and annoyance for Skagwegians.

Mix two parts of Alaskan Brewery’s Raspberry Wheat Beer (or any other similarly tart red fruit beer) with one part prosecco (or champagne).  Cheers to a classy new crisp summer drink!

The Lynn Canal slices up Southeastern Alaska for 90 miles.  Rocky shards of geology contain the path of North America’s largest fjord, their mountainous faces scaling outwards and upwards from the water’s edge.

The canal’s ferry that runs between Juneau and Skagway tugs itself on water that descends 2,000 feet below the hull. The surface is hard and flinty, as if the mountainsides have tumbled into the canal, blending the textures of earth and water together.

There is nothing playful here. The odd home or two rarely breaks up the line of the watchful mountains. The houses are too far away from the ferry deck to discern if they are inhabited or showing signs of neglect. The only suggestions of life are the tips of dorsal fins shaving the water’s surface as orcas profit from the wealth of food during the warm summer months.

At the top of the canal sits the Alaskan town of Skagway. Considered the home of the North Wind, this nonessential Tlingit town became the West Coast boomtown of 1898 when gold was discovered and the Klondike Gold Rush began.

Skagway survived the collapse of the gold supply, but now depends on cruise tourism for survival. Five months out of the year, the town that is twenty-four streets long and three streets wide accepts passengers on these vessels of vacation. People come from China to Mexico and Tennessee to Germany to see Alaska and the Inside Passage. Up to 10,000 passengers come each day on these ships, hoping to see bears, bald eagles and the glaciers that continue to shape Alaska’s terrain. At the end of September, the cruise ships stop coming, shops close up, and only 300 people remain to tuck into the Alaskan winter. It’s a town on life support, with a heart that depends on the extravagance and spending of outsiders.

It’s definitely not Brussels and it’s definitely not the America that I know. At least, not yet. This is where I’ll be for the next few months, staving off reverse culture shock by immersing myself into an American culture totally unlike my own. I’ll be doing the odd job here and there while using the opportunity to learn about the culture – both in general and in beer-related terms – in America’s last frontier. Perhaps by then, I’ll be tough enough for another sort of Wild West – that of my uncharted, unscripted freelancing future.

I never thought I would leave Belgium after moving back to Brussels in 2009. And now that I have, I find myself struggling with how to tell you, the reader, that I left Belgium for the US at the end of April.

Many of you come here because of your interest in Belgium and Brussels, whether it’s connected via traveling, food or beer. Some of you are here for the times when I dabble in recipes. There are also the many of you who come because you know me, so telling you why I left seems redundant.

So the facts are these: after living and working in Brussels for three years, I decided to move back to the US. I’ve been struggling to make this move public because partly, it seems absurd. I still can’t believe I left the city that I enjoy so much. Publicly announcing the change also scares me because it means that I have to face the reality of my decision and reverse culture shock is an intimidating thing to handle.

At the same time, while I’m sad and scared to have left my Belgian life and job behind, there are newer and more challenging prospects ahead – like throwing myself deeper into the worlds of beer, brewing and traveling. Which is what I’m going to be doing a lot of in the near future as I train to become a certified Cicerone.

This means I will continue to write about Brussels and Belgium because it will remain a part of who I am. I have friends there and a part of my life will always exist in that often-overlooked bit on the European map. I will also continue to write about food, culture and traveling because that is who I am and those are things I will never stop doing. The subject of beer, and the culture surrounding it, will obviously also stay and take up some real estate on The Petit Four.

So I guess this now makes everything official and explains the sporadic schedule of posting for the last few weeks. More posts about Brussels and Belgian culture are coming up, but also, some new topics and vistas will start gracing these pages. I’m pretty excited about the upcoming additions and writing about the new opportunities. In the meantime, if any of you are spending time in Brussels, take good care of it for me. I can’t wait to get back.

I wrote several months ago about reverse culture shock and why it’s one of the more destabilizing feelings a person can experience. It’s the earthquake equivalent of emotional adjustment. All you want to do is lie on the ground to make it stop, but that only serves to exacerbate the feeling of unsettledness. The very thing that should be anchoring you is the very cause of disturbance.

To date, most of my quests to merge past lives into my current one revolve around finding Asian food. I’ve needed to stop the gap in this seemingly bottomless pit of an appetite for Chinese food I cultivated five years ago when I lived in Kaifeng. In the years since I’ve left, I have found only three things that have scratched this neverending itch.

Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu has been my standby for homemade Chinese food since a friend recommended it to me a year or so ago. If you are suffering from withdrawal from the food of Northern China and the atmosphere that surrounds the steamy bowls of spicy broth noodles, this book is your new jam.

Asian food discovery number two was in one of the most unlikely of spots – on a side street in the center of Brussels. Rue Grétry is parallel to Celtica, that boozy bastion of insanely cheap happy hour specials that always turn into bad late-night life choices.

Auntie’s Café is a narrow, two-storied restaurant and one of the most authentically Chinese restaurants I’ve encountered outside of the People’s Republic. The tables hold lazy susans, the enabler of family-style serving that’s found throughout China, and the tea is served in tall, cylindrical glasses that show off the blooming of the tightly packed dried tea leaf as it soaks in the piping hot water. Elaborate fragrant cedar carvings and Chinese fortune knots decorate the walls that otherwise have that shabby greyness of utilitarianism to them.

But it’s the food that won me over. Their yu shiang, or fish-fragrant eggplant, was meaty and slick with a sauce that slipped over the tenderly cooked slices of aubergine, carrots, garlic and onions. The baozi, soup-filled pork dumplings, were soupy and soft, the dough stretching valiantly to keep itself together despite the weight in gold it carried within itself: that buttery, pork flavored broth and meat that’s the heart and soul of the famous dumpling. The condiments on the table were fit to boot as well: nothing but black vinegar and chili sauce to swirl together in the tiny saucer-like dish next to your plate.

If I wanted to truly dig into my Chinese past and end the meal in the only appropriate way for a proper Chinese feast, I could have had a digestif of baijiu, that inescapable rice liquor whose very smell is the smell of my liver dying. Needless to say, you can pass on that when topping off a meal at Auntie’s Café in Belgium.

The third place I’ve found has been equally as random and equally as distant from Asia as Auntie’s Café. Walking into Café East, a strip mall restaurant located next to a bowling alley and grocery store in the southeastern London neighborhood of Surrey Quays, is like walking into the Southeast Asian peninsula without needing your passport.

The only people who eat here are the Asian immigrants who have found themselves in London. It’s a large open room with tables packed closely together, making it feel more like a cantine than a restaurant. The fresh cloth tablecloths help tip the restaurant’s balance in favor of being efficient and clean though instead of stark and utilitarian.

The food is astoundingly good. The noodle soups thrive on that delicate thread of evenness between being searingly spicy enough to make your eyes and nose water just ever so, while being supported on deep base of umaminess. This savoury foundation anchors the broth in pure comfort food territory.

The mix of noodles – hand pulled, glass and egg – slink and skate around slips of fragrant cilantro, meat and vegetables. There’s no way to eat it politely. It’s too good and savoury to let you waste any drop, so you’re resigned to literally hunkering down and slurping with the best of them.

Sadly, I don’t have photos of any of these places, I was always too busy fixating on the meal at hand to care about photographic evidence. But just knowing that there are places out there like this beyond Asia is comforting. It helps to somehow quell the annoying, stressful feeling that I’m forever going to be missing some of my favorite experiences from life in Asia. But then again, it just gives me more reason to go back.

These last few weeks have been a blur of travel, making my access to the internet non-existent.  However, I’m back in civilization, but before I kick it into high gear and break down the quality travel tales, it’s time for another installment of Bottlepopped!

This edition features Yamina El Atlassi, one of my personal gurus and go-to people for anything related to Brussels culture.  She knows everything and everyone, and can offer fun tidbits touching upon the city’s history to nightlife and eating suggestions and all the quirky anecdotes in between.  You can find her all over the city, covering a number of items (mainly in French) on different blogs, working at the Strictly Nice Nice events and manning the Brussels Film Festival.  The film fest is coming up soon and always has a fun atmosphere with a quality selection of films, so if you’re in the fair Iris city at some point between June 8 to June 16, it would be worth checking out.

Name: Yamina El Atlassi aka Yelyam
Hometown: Brussels (and Genval, in Brabant Wallon)
Blog: For personal ones (for text and pictures) and collective ones (about Brussels), all info and links are on http://yelyam.org

In your opinion, what’s the oddest aspect of Belgian or Brussels culture?

The fascination for…pee…

We find the posture so aesthetically pleasing that we have three sculptures: Manneken Pis, Jeanneke Pis and Zinneke Pis.

We believe that peeing is so sacred that we even have urinals against a Church…

We feel so joyful while peeing that we have a Pispot Festival.

We take peeing so seriously that we make sure we don’t fail to do it by drinking a lot of beer.

What is the one thing you’ve always wanted to do in Brussels or Belgium that you haven’t had a chance to do yet?

Well, I would like to do the entire ‘”Promenade Verte” (not at once of course, but at least bit by bit!)

Favorite place to grab a drink/hang out?:

So many! It depends on my mood, the weather, the period of the year and the day…

When I’m feeling good, but very busy on a weekday, Café Belga to have a drink while working and Bar du Marché on a Sunday afternoon to listen to jazz while having a cinnamon tea.

When I’m in love and wanting some intimacy on a winter evening, I head to Le Cercle des Voyageurs to talk and order a tea pot for two, preferably the chai.  For dancing with friends, I go to Mr. Wong to dance…even if the party hasn’t started yet.

I eat cake at Arcadi when melancholic. It lets me forget about my life while watching others because I can watch all kinds of people (from tourists to old locals) and listen to them.

And for a little shopping addiction, I visit Cook and Book to lose my head in the middle of all the books.

What’s the one thing about Brussels or Belgium that you wish people knew?

I would like people to know that despite the politicians (and unfortunately more and more people) who complain about “the-other-so-different-community”, that it is obvious that the two cultures are deeply integrated with each other.

It’s not evident when you are in the country, but as a French speaker I realize the connection every time I talk with a French person.  I realize then that there are some words and some ways of thinking that come from the Flemish culture, and that because of this, the French just can not “get it”.

What is the one one restaurant/cafe/bar that characterizes Belgium?

La Régence, Place Fernand Coq.

It’s an old place. The decoration may seem a bit depressing: it’s the kind of place you would have found everywhere in Brussels in the past…. and the past that may not always be full of good memories.

The population is very eclectic: all ages, types and styles coming with family or friends : a lot of old people and a lot of young people.

It’s so cheap and we Bruxellois like Brussels to stay this cheap, but it’s not the case, except in these kinds of places. The “Bolo” (spaghetti bolognaise) is at 6,90€ and the Wednesday lunch menu is a beefsteak with salad and fries for… 7,5€ !

The menu offers a range of various dishes and you can eat or only have a drink or a crepe, or a Brussels Waffle in the afternoon.

The waiters are all dressed like classical waiters: white shirt, black paint, a vest and an apron…Oh, and there’s also a “flipper.”

++++

Thanks Yamina!

Spain is by all accounts a wine country.  But despite the vinters hold on the Iberian Peninsula, there is a growing microbrewery movement taking root, especially in Barcelona.

These Spanish brewers are worthy additions to the world’s brewing scene as they have that certain trait of joyful insanity that seems to be instilled in many small brewers, propelling them forward to create a product that can be both a drain on financial resources and time.  They are the modern day Don Quixote’s and they are forging the way against the tide of Spain’s wine culture.  In Catalonia, this enthusiasm for pursuing something different is embodied in Barcelona’s first microbrewery, Glops.

The brewery is a small operation, comprised of only one enthusiastic man, Alex, and the occasional aid that comes in the form of his mother.  His passion for beer and its possibilities was sparked during a trip to Munich when he was 18 and experienced the wonder that is German beer.  When he returned to Barcelona, he enrolled in an agricultural school that had a fermentation program and eventually set up his company Llúpols i Llevats, which means hops and yeast in Catalan.  The name of his line of beer, Glops, means ‘gulps’ in his mother tongue.

His beer also stands for something in Catalonia.  The beer is a tangible product of how he views his own culture and how he would like others to view the Catalan region.  As his success in brewing grew, people began to ask for a purely Catalan beer.  As there wasn’t one, he created it.  He wanted to create something that tasted like the region and something that prominently featured ingredients all Catalans recognize and identify with.  The result is Glops D’Hivern, one of the most unusual and fascinating beers I’ve experienced to date.

Glops D’Hivern, despite its name, is not purely a winter beer.  This rosemary and honey beer highlights Catalonia’s honey production and the sweet flavoring sits well with the rosemary, an herb that grows in abundance in the rough Catalan countryside. To Alex, the plant is worthy of Catalans because of its tough and hardy nature and ability to survive in difficult conditions.

The meaty rosemary aroma caught me off guard, but slipped in like a well-tailored glove to the sweet silky drinkability of the honey.  The unusualness of the aroma and taste pairing left me bowled over and pleasantly surprised, sort of like when I had my first taste of Cantillon’s tart champagney gueuze.

For a long time, I couldn’t stop thinking about that beer after I left the brewery.  It was savory and fragrant in a way that made the beer feel like a meal in such a direct way that I had never experienced before.  Other beers have felt filling, but the connection between beer’s past as an occasional meal substitute came from a reliance on general heaviness, with their pudding-like foam and velvety alcohol.  Never on taste alone.  This beer is light and playful while hitting such a deep note of umaminess and depth that it is totally satisfying without making me want to take a nap afterward.

However, Alex faces difficulties in wine soaked Spain despite even with a great beer.  Like all brewers, he faces the challenge of people’s tastes and the perception of the drink.  This is probably exacerbated even further by the prevalence of wine in his country’s culture and palates.

There’s also the issue of increasing awareness of his craft in more beer-friendly markets, like the UK and Belgium.  As it currently stands, smaller outfits like his need to comply with the same price standards and qualifications as the larger industrial giants in Spain because there’s no legislative structure to support microbreweries.  This basically makes export impossible because of price and logistical implications.  However, Alex’s efforts in the brewing industry have given him enough street cred to create a special interest group for small brewers in the country.  The group is currently working on lobbying the Spanish government to create a separate set of laws and guidelines for smaller operations in the country.  He’s definitely fighting a good fight and if successful, his group’s efforts would help make it possible for Spain’s fledgling microbrew industry to grow the stronger roots needed for survival, sort of like his region’s resilient rosemary.

Even though it’s been a few weeks since I met Alex and tried his beer, I’m still thinking about it. To me, that’s the mark of a ‘craft’ beer, when a personality behind the beer comes through.  I think this is also why I’m so fascinated by the drink overall.  In so many ways, beer is simply the vessel that carries the story behind its creation, and that story is always about the people.  Brewers are storytellers, albeit by a different name.  They carry on the tradition, the values, and the mythology of the culture that shapes them. And when a story, or a beer, is well thought out, how can it be anything but interesting?

I was recently asked by RyanAir’s Inflight Magazine to put together a little restaurant and café guide for Brussels.  It was a lot of fun to make the list, so I thought I would share a more expansive one for those of you who won’t have a chance to see the article while flying on Europe’s favorite discount airline.

So, without further ado, here is the first installment of my personal top places to grab a drink in Brussels:

Maison du Peuple: This trendy bar right on the Parvis St. Gilles attracts a fun mixed crowd.  On the weekend mornings it’s full of bougie young families that brunch and slightly hung over college students studying, while during the weeknights you’ll find people from all age ranges talking to friends over their wide array of beverage options.  The weekends host great DJ and band sets too.  The café’s managed to hit that sweet spot of being a cool neighborhood bar that attracts young hip twentysomethings without being too pretentious for older people.  They also have a dangerous happy hour from 19h – 20h where cocktails are two for the price of one.

39 Parvis St. Gilles
1060 St. Gilles

L’Atelier: L’Atelier is the café to experience for those on a student budget but wanting to sample more of Belgium’s esoteric beers. Located near the campuses of the VUB and ULB, this windowless, modern take on the traditional Belgian brown café is an easy way to spend hours expanding your beer knowledge. The atmosphere encourages conversation amongst those at your table and those sitting next to you.  Striking up conversation with strangers is made even easier by the extensive availability and ever-changing roster of Belgian beer.

77 Rue Elise
1050 Ixelles

Poechenellkelder: Poechenellekelder is a serious beer bar highlighting the best of Belgium’s rich beer culture. Despite its location directly across from the Manneken Pis, this atmospheric café is usually only frequented by local Bruxellois. Sometimes it’s possible to overhear conversations in Brusselaar, a special dialect spoken only in the city. This café mixes its extensive beer menu with a varied selection of jenever, like blood-orange, mocha, limoncello and about twenty others. All of this liquid culture is happily washed down alongside a quirky decorating scheme featuring eclectic memorabilia like crossbows, smoking goats and a collection of costumed Manneken Pis statuettes.

Rue du Chêne 5
1000 Brussels

Le Corbeau: Le Corbeau suffers from a serious personality disorder.  Sunday to Thursday, it’s a traditional Brussels brown café.  Seeing old men flip through their daily papers while slurping up a big bowl of bolognaise isn’t too uncommon.  Then comes Friday and Saturday nights.  The Corbeau serves up serious beer in a serious glass: the Chevalier.  A litre glass of beer (the bar proclaims that it costs 500 euros, so if you break it, you buy it.  However, I think it’s more for theft prevention) has a tendency to function like a series of quick shots of tequila – in that it makes everyone do crazy things, like dance on the tables.  The main selling point of this bar is that, without fail at some point on Friday and Saturday evenings, someone will be so moved by the song that’s playing (Gwen Stefani’s ‘Bananas,’ a disco version of Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you,’ etc) that they just need to dance…on the table.  It’s actually a genius move because with everyone dancing on the tables, there’s more room for people to come in since the floor space is left available.

Rue Saint-Michel 18
1000 Brussels

Old Oak: One of the benefits of living in Brussels is the international base of the city’s population.  Its proximity to the British Isles means that yes, there’s a decent amount of Brits in the area and that means one thing – pub quiz.  The Old Oak is a smallish, darkly wooded bar in the Schuman area of the EU quarter and has the city’s best pub quiz.  The sound system is top notch so you can hear the questions, which makes it leaps and bounds better than the other questionable sound systems like at Michael Collins. The MC, a cheeky Irish man who appears to have eyes in the back of his head, makes it worth a go as well because he calls you out for doing something stupid when it appears that he can’t even see you.

Rue Franklin 26
1000 Brussels

Goupil le Fol: While Belgium is known for its beer, Goupil le Fol offers a respite from all the yeast and hops with its deliciously refreshing house-made fruit wines and cognac. This multiple-level lounge/bar is a haven for lovers and drinkers in search of a cozy couch. A former brothel, the atmospheric twists and turns of the old building are livened up by the always-changing paintings, antique books and odd knick-knacks. You can easily spend hours sipping away on one of the cafes chilled drinks while listening to the crooning chansons of Edith Piaf and the hometown hero, Jacques Brel.

Rue de la Violette 22
1000 Brussels

Santa Claus, and the other variations of wintertime’s favorite jowly character, is the world’s most famous happy fat man.  The runner-up to this rotund jolliness though is Gambrinus, the King of Flanders. He is also, and most importantly for the world and Belgium, considered to be the king of beer.

Nobody knows for sure if this king was real or if he was even just one person.  He may be a mythical mish-mash of Jan Primus, or Jean the First, with a man named Jean Sans Peur (Fearless John).  There are also probably character traits from some beloved local drunk mixed in there too.  This amalgamation of people has led to the creation of the legendary boozy Belgian ruler from the Middle Ages, Gambrinus.

In any case, this storied character is routinely depicted as a joyfully paunchy man astride barrels of beer and a frothy mug in tow.  This image of drunken revelry is corroborated with the stories that surround him, making him appear to be a general all-around good guy and bon vivant.

One legend depicting how he was given the mantle the King of the Brewers goes back to the time of the Dukes of Brabant.  In a quest to appoint a new leader, the brewers decided that the first man to complete an undertaking of beer-related strength would be worthy of the title.  So the brewers set forth a barrel of beer in the Grand Place and decreed that any man who could lift and carry the barrel to a designated spot two yards away would become the leader of the guild.

Man after man struggled to carry the barrel, which was probably an astounding 300+ pounds at the time.  After all the men had volunteered and failed, Gambrinus, who had been watching over the trials, offered to try and complete this seemingly impossible task.  He ordered for the barrel to be tapped and then promptly laid down underneath it, drinking the entire contents inside.  Now empty, he was able to successfully carry the barrel and win the title King of the Brewers.

The Belgian Knighthood of the Brewers Mash Staff, the modern-day version of the brewers’ guild from the Middle Ages, have their own stories about the man they still hold as one of their emblematic personages.  The Knighthood regards him as one of their own because he was one of the first rulers in Belgium to grant licenses for brewing and selling beer.  He also had a penchant for consuming large amounts of the stuff during festivals.  According to their account, Gambrinus further solidified his role as patron of all things beery and enjoyable when he succumbed to that festive, happy feeling you develop for everyone after a few glasses of beer.  Upon reaching that point of universal love, he clambered on top of emptied beer barrels to proclaim his love and admiration for his fellow soldiers during a post-battle celebration.

Today, April 11^th, is this mythical man’s birthday and in recognition for the man who continues to inspire Belgian brewers, I feel like there is no better drink to raise in his honor than Cantillon’s Rosé de Gambrinus.

The Rosé de Gambrinus is Cantillon’s framboise beer.  Made by blending fresh raspberries in two-year-old lambic, this fruit beer has a sweetish taste from the natural fruit sugars with a nice tart crack at the end, making the drink light and balanced.  The sweetness is subtle, so your tongue isn’t left bathing in residual syrup afterward because no artificial sweeteners or sugars are added.

The drink itself is a shiny candy-colored red with a Willy Wonka pinkness to its head when first poured.  Without a doubt, it is an incredibly girly looking drink, so many people like to pair a framboise beer with Valentine’s Day.  Even so, the drink’s measured play between sweet, sour and pinkness lets it be drinkable without ever verging into juice-territory.  And as a lambic, there’s a gentle carbonation and naturalness to its flavor, which makes it more like a nice bubbly wine than what most people usually associate with beer.  This also makes it ideal as a speech-giving drink and something to cheers with after.  I think Gambrinus would approve from his perch on top of the empty beer barrels.

Here’s to many happy returns!

Barcelona is the sort of place that makes me nervously tongue-tied. No matter how much I enjoy myself while I’m there, I always leave feeling untethered and unsure.

Spain intimidates me because it’s so close to the world that I know, but operating on its own frequency.  It’s this alternate rhythm that’s nerve-wracking. When you travel often, you come to realize that most places and cities in the world share a common hum that ticks throughout, connecting them to the same vibration. So when you visit a place like Spain where there is a different time signature, you experience a disarming shock. The common thread you’ve come to expect for a shred of normalcy in a new place isn’t so common anymore.

I think this shock hits hard coming from Belgium.  Belgium is frequently called the most Northern of the Southern cultures, and the most Southern of the Northern.  The grey area that Belgians excel at living in lets people develop a nebulous sense of understanding between the two latitudinal halves of Europe. But a visit to Spain blows that shred of Southern cultural understanding to bits.

The moment of being overwhelmed and terrified comes when you realize how long this culture has been operating apart from your previously perceived general order of things. It seems like an obvious and glib statement, but there’s a fine line separating the knowing from the understanding. We know there are different ways of life, but experiencing the manifestation of those differences makes you comprehend how fantastically malleable human society is. You can’t help but wonder how many more places there are in the world like this, places that offer a glimpse of how large the bottom of the ice berg you’re standing on may be. The possibility of that grandness makes you feel very small.

Barcelona augments Spain’s feeling of particularity. As the capital of Catalonia, a region whose engines are always revving to take off from Spain, the sense of uniqueness and otherness is celebrated. It’s logical that Picasso, Joan Miro and Antoni Gaudi found inspiration in their home country, snuggling in amongst its difference from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.

I like Barcelona because of this celebration and pride. It’s a surprisingly freeing feeling coming from places like Brussels where the individuality of Art Nouveau was torn down before locals could understand its value. Or from the US, where for many people the stamped out patterns of suburbia are the norm. Suddenly seeing the fanciful architecture of Gaudi and other modernists pop up next to traditional Gothic-style apartment complexes makes you feel like you’ve accidentally tripped down the rabbit hole.

The Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi’s massive ode to God and modernism, is Barcelona’s major cathedral and one of the city’s main symbols. The façade drips with hallucinogenic natural forms and the spires look as if they’ve been formed by a child who slowly and deliberately dribbled sand droplets on top of each other to build the sandy stalagmites.

The Sagrada Familia exemplifies this thing that Barcelona does so well – it takes a standard form and flips it ever so slightly. The cathedral has the essence of all the cathedrals or grand European buildings I’ve visited, but is psychotropic with its sculptures of animals melting into human forms and the skeletal bones of the interior. Its scaffolding seems normal and apropos for the building’s grandness as well, but only until you remember that it’s still being built, not renovated.

Gaudi’s cathedral captures another element that runs throughout Spain.  It’s this feeling that every celebration of individuality and experimentation has a direct connection to tradition.  This quiet assertion that the past can be mixed with new ideas and risks without having the world come to an end feels humbling from my current American perspective.

Spain feels like it uses its traditional past differently.  It reminds me that sometimes in America we focus a bit too much on maintaining tradition exactly as it is for the sake of tradition.  We sometimes forget to remember that at one point, our tradition was once somebody’s vanguard.  Tradition is not meant to be fought for or against, but to serve as a foundation and a building block.

So why am I tongue-tied? This is my third trip to Spain, and my second one to Barcelona, so I wasn’t expecting to leave again with the feeling that the floor had just opened up beneath me. I left being reminded how large Europe was and more importantly, that I had fallen into a trap that Americans are more likely to fall into than others.  We come from a relatively uniform culture within a continent-wide country, making it hard to actively remember that as a continent, Europe does not share our cultural consistency. We have an inverse connection between geographical size and cultural homogeneousness.  Only in the US can you spend a weekend on the other side of the country while speaking the same language as in your hometown and without experiencing major culture shock.

I’m not sure when I fell into the feeling that Europe is an accessible lump culture, but thankfully Spain cracked apart my narrowing perception. I started to believe a little too strongly in that specific hum of life that I had found woven throughout my other travels. But that’s the benefit of traveling and the need to be overwhelmed with the largeness of human versatility. There is a common thread that links multiple cultures together, and it’s necessary to believe in that commonality. But the awesome feeling of traveling is when you realize that there’s more than one possible thread connecting you to other ways of life and the people who live them. The dumbfounding beauty is knowing that there is an infinite number of threads out there and that we only shortchange ourselves once we stop looking.