The Ultimate Test -- Germany/Holland

My last few days in Europe were special. I'd go as far to say that they were as perfect as they could have been.

Sometimes I need to know that I can leave a place -- leave a person -- and when I return, everything will be okay.

Everything will be different, but it'll all be okay.

My last few days with Billie, Julia and Maud were more than okay.

Billie prepared a frying pan full of happy pig sausages for our first night and bought eight (at least) different kinds of cheese which I sliced and turned into a plate of magic.

This woman must read my blog. Only someone who knows me very well could fully understand the amount of cheese I can demolish in one sitting. 

We drank aperol spritz and I told stories about hitchhiking through the Balkans, couchsurfing on yachts and volunteering with a woman who believed Jesus was from Venus and Buddha was from Mars (or vice versa... I can't really remember). Billie told me stories of previous volunteers, their new dog (the sweetest, most gigantic epileptic puppy named Fidel) and we laughed and laughed until everything hurt.

Which is one of the best ways to make everything hurt.

Maud and I took a quick jaunt to Bad Kreuznach (I feel confident spelling the name of this town, but pronouncing it correctly is still entirely beyond me) the next day. We drank an acidic cappuccino (come on, Germany! what's up with the shit coffee?) and wandered through downtown until we were tired of wandering.

It's sweater weather... I looked down at my goose-pimpled skin. Finally. Goodness, this is so refreshing after the heat of Southern Italy and Barcelona. It'll be good to have the two months in Colorado and Oregon before heading to Mexico, too. I love sunshine, but my body is definitely craving a few "soft days". A blizzard might be nice. Or a typical Colorado hail storm out of a blue sky. 

The Healing Sanctuary is located in Puerto Escondido, which is a small surfing city on the coast of southern Mexico in the region of Oaxaca. This part of the world has 300+ days of sunshine a year and in January, the low is 47 degrees Fahrenheit and the high is 77.

Yeah... A goodbye hail storm from Colorado would be splendid. Probably won't have cold weather again for quite a while. 
 

By the way, Oaxaca is famous for its chocolate, its Oaxaca cheese (kind of like mozzarella) and its fried grasshoppers. 

baha.... sounds like the place for me. 

I cooked a pumpkin, chickpea tagine that night and served it with a Moroccan tomato salad. Billie is mostly vegetarian (she eats happy meat once a week), so these are the moments I celebrate my ability to cook for people with so many different tastes, morals and dietary restrictions.

Passing through a hundred doors will do that to you... 

The French volunteer had the lot of us doubled over in hysterics. She's the sort of person who takes the things that normal people joke about doing and then actually does them. Several times.

When I had horses, I used to always smell their grain and think, man... that smells so good. It smells better than granola. I wonder if it tastes better than granola...

But that's usually where I stopped.


I wonder if it tastes better than granola... being the final thought. I don't mind letting myself wonder. I'm a lady who loves to experiment and experience, but there are certain aspects of life I am perfectly content to leave to my overactive imagination.

Alpaca grain smells very similar to horse grain.

"Za grain smells so good," the French volunteer complained as we ate tagine, "but every time I taste it, I am always so disappointed!"

Every time she tastes it. Once wasn't enough.

Maud and I stopped by a nearby pumpkin/new wine/pretzel stand the next afternoon. We ordered the seasonal federweisser and some strange wurst we'd never heard of before.

Simply because it was a strange wurst we'd never heard of before. And the woman told Maud (in German) that it was a circular sort of sausage that was served "in a box".

"That sounds hilarious. We definitely need to get that."

 Unfortunately, "In a box" in German actually translates into "in a can".

Thus, we received a can of sausage that resembled cat food, in taste, texture and appearance.

Not that I've ever tried cat food (although I wouldn't put it past the French volunteer).

Just a can. On a plate. With two sad pickles, four pieces of plain brown bread and a packet of mustard.

This. This is why people say that German food is terrible. 

"Wow... this is not what I imagined with she said round sausage in a box. Now we know."

Traumatized, we returned to Billie's and I made a lemon meringue pie. A pie I couldn't eat, but thoroughly enjoyed baking.

That evening's meal more than compensated for the canned sausage however, and Germany quickly returned to my "countries with fabulous food" book.

This is mostly thanks to Simon, Julia's husband. This man is a cooking machine (if they made "Simon Cooking Machines", I would purchase one to put in my kitchen. But they don't. So I just have to be jealous of Julia for marrying him). He barbecued sis kebap and chicken wings and wurst while Julia and her friend made three different kinds of South African cocktails.

I think I want to buy a Julia Cocktail Machine AND a Simon Cooking Machine. Mmmm... no wonder they're such a good couple. 

We commenced our five hour drive back to Holland just before noon the next day.

Billie and Julia thanked us for visiting. Thanked me for squeezing them in before returning to the States.

I'm still not sure how this is happening, I thought as I hugged my fun-loving German friends goodbye. They just opened up their homes and treated me to a priceless few days. They threw a freakin' party for us, for pete's sake. And now... they're thanking ME? 

I promised to visit them after my adventure through Central and South America.

"I'll have so many stories next time I'm here! So many new recipes. My legs will be hairier. Oh, and I'll be able to speak Spanish!" 

I try to live a life without expectations (although the have the insidious habit of sneaking in more often than I'd care to admit), but I think I can safely expect that I will be incredibly happy to see Billie and Julia when I'm next in Germany.  

Maud took me to Scheveningen that night. We walked along the beach and I tried to peacefully, contemplatively gaze at the North Sea, thinking, this is the last time you'll see the Atlantic for months, Bourget -- what have you learned on this side of the world? What lessons are you taking back to America with you?

However, the fact that I was bursting to use the loo -- absolutely desperate to pee -- made peaceful contemplation rather difficult.

"Maud?" I asked with a cheeky grin.

"Yeah?"

"Wanna take off our clothes and run into the sea?"

"Why not?"

"Just a quickie. Up to the shoulders."

"Okay."

"Do you swear upon the alpaca that you'll run in up to your shoulders?"

We should hands.

(Maud and I now swear upon the alpaca. This developed because I was afraid that Maud would make me eat half a chicken satay and an entire sausage. So I said, "You have to swear to me that you'll share both meals." "Swear on what?" "Well, what do we both like?" "Well... we both like Billie...but we can't swear on Billie." "We can swear upon the alpaca!" "So what happens if we violate our alpaca oath?" "We're cursed with a year of crap cappuccinos, that's what happens.")

"If you don't reach your shoulders, you're going to have absolute sh*t coffee for the next year, got that?"

So we dropped our bags (and our clothes) and ran into the sea.

"Cold, cold, cold, cold...." I chattered and shivered and forged ahead into the waves. "SHOULDERS!" I ducked down and then started to run back to shore.

It wasn't until I picked up my clothes that I remembered the entire reason I'd tricked Maud into running into the sea with me was because I had to pee.

Damnit... Blurgh. Fine. 

So I ran back into the sea, did my business and skip-hopped-careened out. 

It was half an hour later that we noticed a fellow who looked like he'd been sitting under the nearby bridge for a very long time.

"Meh. Must have been amused, at the very least," I smiled playfully and wriggled my toes in the sand. I love how nonchalant I've become about nudity. So what if a strange Dutch man just saw me take a leak in the sea? Meh. There are worse things. Like sausage in a can.

Back at Maud's, I cut up some bananas, found some liqueur and prepared my last bananas foster in Europe.

I've made this flaming dessert in so many countries now... my goodness. France, Germany, Holland, Morocco, England, Ireland... it's served me well. 

And as I can't sleep the night before a flight, Maud stayed up with me and watched Friends until four o'clock in the morning. We watched the last disc with the episode wherein Rachel almost goes to Paris...but then decides she's in love with Ross... so doesn't go to Paris.

Maud cries during this episode.

I just feel annoyed with Rachel for not going to Paris.

Am I completely heartless, is this episode just too cliché for me to empathize with or am I an excessively independent lady? 

Probably a combination of the three. 

Maud took me to the airport the next morning. During check in, the lady at the desk asked if I lived in the States.

"The machine is telling me to ask you," she said as she looked at my passport. 

I didn't know what to say.

"I suppose I do... but I haven't been there in sixteen months. I get mail there sometimes."

We ate sausage in a bag (a Dutch specialty that is significantly tastier than the German specialty of sausage in a can) and then hugged each other goodbye. 

"We'll meet again. You're going to be a part of my life for a very, very long time. I know it."

"I hope so."

Okay America... here I come. I don't feel ready, but life doesn't wait for ready. Just like I don't wait for life. Things happen. America is happening now. I'm going to try to treat my time there just like my time in Istanbul or Devon or Vis -- I'm going to let it be new. Let it be fresh. 

I'm going to see if I can have a beginner's mind in the place I know the best. This. This is the ultimate test. 

It Kept My Story -- Cochem, Germany

We left for Germany Wednesday morning at about half nine. Between episodes of being knackered and being more knackered the night before, I'd done a bit of smart traveler google searching.

"Cute towns in Germany" being the most productive phrase.

So I entered all the cute towns from my "cute town" google search into google maps and tried to see if any happened to pop up on the way to Billie's. Lo and behold, Cochem popped up about an hour and a half away from our final destination.

"Wanna get a cappuccino at Cochem?" I asked my hot Dutch friend.

"Sure, why not?" she agreed.

We drove for three and a half hours through pancake Holland and slightly hilly Germany. Sometimes I woke up from my half-asleep car nap (I can never fall all the way asleep in cars) and saw that we were passing signs for towns like, 'Gouda' and 'Oosterhout' and 'Hoogstraten' and I laughed myself back to half-asleep.

New life goal: live in a town called 'Gouda'. Or 'Edam'. Baha... 

But Cochem was pretty nice too. Even if its name wasn't as exciting as Hoogstraten.

 

There were cats outside of our cafe, so we had good feelings about its potential to have good cappuccinos... (also, we had to pee, so we kind of charged into the first cafe we saw and then blamed the cats for our poor decision)

Never trust happy cats. They do not mean good cappuccinos. They mean cappuccinos that taste like acidic dirt.

 However, the quaintness of the town itself more than compensated for its acidic cappuccinos.

I'm not exactly sure what's happening with this statue, but I feel like the goat got the bad end of the bargain.

We got quite lost on the way back to our car and ended up seeing a bit more of the town than we would have liked. Then the oil light started blinking and Maud did her Dutch version of panicking.

Which looks like my version of being slightly confused/pissed off.

"How come my dad didn't tell me the car needed oil? He always checks the oil."

"Can we stop and top up? They should have oil at gas stations..."

"Yeah, but I don't know where to go in Germany."

"Do you think we can make it all the way to Billie's? Then she can tell you where to go and we can take it in tomorrow."

"An hour and a half... I'm not sure."

The orange light glared at us. Menacingly. Maud swore.

"I don't even know how to put the oil in. Do you?"

"No," I hated myself for being the stereotypical helpless woman. "But I bet you could get the people working at the gas station to help us."

"F*ck, man. I'm worried."

"Okay, let's stop here," I gestured towards a large gas station a couple hundred meters down the road. "For peace of mind."

Maud's English is impeccable, but Maud's German isn't exactly perfect. However, she did manage to convince a cute, blushing German chap to help us with the oil. I assumed that she'd go in there, buy the cheapest bottle of oil, and they would show her where to put it. However, topping up the car ended up being far more complicated than either of us had guessed, as we didn't know the type of oil the car needed and the car's manual was in Dutch (so our blushing German couldn't help much). So a good twenty minutes (and many blushes) later, we were back on the autobahn and heading towards Billie's.

"We wouldn't have made it to Billie's," Maud told me as we sped along. "The guy said that once the light comes on, you don't have a lot of time."

"Well, it's a good thing we stopped."

"I'll say. Can you imagine if I'd blown up the engine of my parents' car while they're on vacation?"

"It's a really good thing we stopped."

Julia and Billie weren't at the farmhouse when we arrived, but a Dutch volunteer from Portugal and a French volunteer greeted us in the living room.

Old farmhouses make me happy. Dog hair, cat hair, alpaca hair, lumpy couches covered with pillows and blankets and all aforementioned hair --

mmm.... this feels like a home. 

The more I travel, the more I notice the difference between homes and houses. Homes have personality. They don't necessarily have to be messy or cluttered, but they have to be lived in (for me to feel at home, anyway).  Homes have stained cookbooks and half-empty spice jars and chipped mugs. Homes have framed paintings and photos of family on the walls. 

Billie framed my alpaca postcard and had it on her wall.

Homes have stories. They're like cast iron skillets and can remember what you cooked for dinner last week.

Billie has the nicest home. And I love that it kept my story from last October.

Curse Those Cookies -- Rotterdam, Holland

Maud took good care of me on Tuesday. I was still wobbly from the cookie disaster, so we spent the day quietly mourning over Monday, eating old cheese and looking at windmills.

"Whenever I forget anything you've told me or anything we've done together, I'm just going to say, "that must have happened on Monday." 'Cos Monday fell into a black hole, or something. I have no idea what happened to that day."

"And I had so many things planned!" Maud moaned. "We were going to cut our hair and I was going to take you to the beach. You were going to try the raw herring and we were going to eat frikandel."

*sigh*

"Too many cookies."

*sigh*

"Too many cookies."

Looking at windmills is not normally considered a strenuous activity, but after half an hour of casually walking back and forth on land flatter than a European pancake, I was positively knackered.

Curse those cookies...

As I was useless and tired, we drove back to Maud's. I packed my bag for our roadtrip to Germany and considered the day good and finished.

Never. Again. Oof. No more missing Mondays. 

How We Lost Monday -- Amsterdam, Holland

I woke early on Sunday morning and made breakfast for Maud.

Sometimes I feel like I want a roommate/boyfriend just so I can cook breakfast (cooking breakfast just for myself is boring). Most places I go, I meet people who say something akin to, "Yeah, I love breakfast. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and you're supposed to never skip breakfast, bla-bla-bla... But it's either have a nice breakfast or sleep for a few more minutes. So I skip the nice breakfast and sleep for a few more minutes."

These are my favorite kinds of people. 'Cos I don't need sleep and I like cooking breakfast.

We fit together like peas and carrots.

Maud is the pea to my carrot. The bacon to my eggs. The cheese to my everything.

I made Maud a low-fat (she hates fat almost as much as I love it) cappuccino and a stack of crepes for breakfast. I'd wanted to make her some chubby American pancakes, but many Europeans don't keep baking powder or baking soda in their spice cabinet -- so crepes were the best that I could do. But even though they weren't as epic as I'd wanted them to be (a crepe is never as epic as an American pancake) they looked ever so lovely next to the cappuccino with a dollop of whipped cream slowly melting into the middle, Viennese style.

Learning how to make coffee in a strange kitchen is always one of the challenges I enjoy overcoming. Sabina's Gregor was my favorite, but he is closely followed by Fritz (this is what I'm naming Maud's milk frother). Every morning this week, I pour a few drops of milk inside of Fritz's metal bowl and turn him on. He whizzes and puffs and produced a prodigious amount of frothy milk to pour atop my coffee.

I like Fritz. Maud likes it when I use Fritz.

Maud went to get ready and I packed a lunch for us to share. Farmer's cheese and olives and tomatoes and nuts and apples and bananas and a bottle of white wine. Google had told us the weather would be questionable, so I even packed a picnic mat into Maud's backpack.

Then I napped.

Then I guilty-pleasure googled opportunities in South America (SO MANY COOL THINGS TO DO).

Then I took another nap.

Then I read a few chapters in my Neil Gaiman book.

Then Maud came downstairs and announced that she was ready to go.

So I went upstairs to get ready (by the time I came downstairs, Maud was almost ready to go).

One thing that's awesome about not shaving my legs, not wearing makeup and making the conscious decision to not stress out about my appearance?

To many ladies, getting ready = shower, wash hair, shave legs, shave armpits, check if eyebrows are properly plucked, apply moisturizer, style hair, put on makeup, slather on deodorant, decide what to wear and voila. Ready.

To me, getting ready = shower, wash hair, slather on deodorant, put on the clothes that smell the least and voila. Ready. 

We walked to the bus stop around the corner, Maud carrying our heavy picnic and me carrying my bulky camera. Sometimes I feel guilty for letting Maud carry the heavy things (I think she might wear the pants in our relationship), but then I remember that this is my hot Dutch friend. This is the lady who graduated sports academy and has muscles that make my chaturanga arms look like spaghetti.

And then I don't feel so guilty for letting Maud carry the heavy things. 

As the bird flies, Amsterdam is about 65 km from Maud's home.

To an American accustomed to driving on enormous roads with little/no traffic, 65 km translates into 40 minutes of travel time -- and that's only if you're driving like a grandma. Thus, as we'd left Maud's cozy home at 8:30, I just assumed we'd arrive in Amsterdam at 10:00 (at the very latest).

But it was Sunday, and as Europe isn't fond of Sundays, the only bus from the stop around the corner wouldn't be dropping by until well after nine o'clock.

So we speed-walked to the large bus stop. Then we took a bus to the tram. A tram to another tram. The other tram to the train at Rotterdam Centrale (where there was all sorts of hullabaloo and confusion regarding the ticket to Amsterdam, so we lost more time). And (finally) a train to Amsterdam.

We arrived in Amsterdam at 11:30.

It might have been faster to hitchhike... Jesus. 

Something about Holland, should you ever visit this cloudy little country full of cheese, windmills and not nearly as many wooden clogs as I'd hoped --

-- it's expensive. Bloody expensive. Heinously expensive. Dutch people charge you for everything. Fuel is the equivalent of eight dollars a gallon. Public transportation is public robbery. Museum prices make my vagabond budget curl up in the corner like a frightened hedgehog.

Consider yourself warned. If I didn't have Maud (whose generosity has been truly humbling), my stay in Holland would have looked something like this:

Wake up. Eat yogurt (yogurt isn't so expensive in Holland). Walk around the suburbs. Eat sausage in a bag (also not too expensive in Holland). Walk around the suburbs. Eat cheese (not very cheap, but I can't live without cheese). Walk around the suburbs. Sleep.

But because Maud has the heart the size of a wheel of Old Amsterdam cheese (which is delicious and nutty, by the way), she wanted my last two weeks in Europe to be the best they could possibly be.

Because I have Maud, I got to go to Amsterdam.

This is... wow. This place has such a weird vibe, I thought as we exited the train station. It's got more bicycles than Copenhagen and is more structured than Barcelona... but it's loud like Barcelona. Makes Copenhagen feel like a cemetery. It's touristic like Venice, but I... well, I almost like this kind of touristic. It means lots of cheese shops and coffee houses. So much young energy in such an old place.

This is the size of Maud's heart.

This blue china is famous in The Netherlands. It's called Delftware and is a tin-glazed pottery that became popular in the 16th century.

Amsterdam is lined with cheese shops. Inside each cheese shop is a mouthwatering array of samples. Most people go into one shop and try a few.

I went into a few shops and tried them all (in each shop).

"I want to live in Amsterdam so I can eat samples every day," I told Maud as I stuffed my face full of pesto cheese. "Do you think they'd notice? Maybe I'd have to start wearing disguises."

Yes. I could live off of this. I might eventually be as round as these cheeses, but it would make it easier to roll in and out the door. I'd be a very different kind of ninja. 

SO MUCH CHEESE

After raiding several cheese shops (and buying nothing), we stopped by a coffeeshop to check out marijuana prices.

Before I continue this tale, let me first mention my view on pot.

*ahem*

I think it's okay. I don't think you can compare marijuana to hard drugs, I think it has a lot of potential to help people deal with pain and I think that using it for fun does not make you a bad person. I wouldn't want to be addicted to it because I don't think any addiction is healthy and a pot habit is too expensive for my lifestyle (just like that cute pixie haircut I wish I could always have). But I think that getting high every now and then is as hunky-dory as drinking a glass or two of wine at whichever meal you feel the urge to drink a glass or two of wine.

Which I think is pretty hunky-dory.

I've tried smoking a few times at university, once in Wales and once in Morocco -- but nothing ever happened. Everyone around me got super giggly and I just felt left out. Everyone I've told about my inability to feel anything via smoking has told me to try an edible. Hence, our Amsterdam to-do list included purchasing space cake ingredients (the normal space cakes have gluten, so we'd have to bake our own). 

It probably would have been a better idea to just have a gluten induced tummy-ache (foreshadowing!)

Tulips aren't in season at the moment, but their bulbs were still for sale at the flower market.

Tip for travelers to Amsterdam:

Don't visit on a Sunday. All of Amsterdam's famous markets are closed (told you that Europe hates Sundays).

We'd purchased our tickets for the Van Gogh museum the night before, and when you purchase tickets online, you pick a time slot. Our tickets were for 15:00, so we decided to wend our way to one of Amsterdam's many parks for our picnic beforehand.

The Van Gogh museum was incredible. I'm not much of a painter and I'm definitely not knowledgeable enough to critique art, but I am a sensitive lady.

And Van Gogh's work is piercing. The circular style in which he layered the paint on his self portraits completely captured me. When I was a kid, my mom used to put me down for afternoon naps with a fan in the room. I hated the fan because like just about everything else in my childhood, the fan gave me nightmares. I'd start to fall asleep and then the sound of the spinning blades would get into my brain. My head started to thunder and whirl and pressure would build up until I thought my forehead would explode. Then I'd either fall asleep and have nightmares of tornadoes or I'd wake up and feel too afraid to close my eyes again.

That's what Van Gogh's self portraits did to me (swear to Slovenian Jesus I wasn't high).

Dutch stroller

My hair is almost long enough for flowers. :)

We bought our space cake ingredients, walked up and down the canals and then made our way into the Sex Museum.

Which was hilarious. I'm about 90% vanilla (10% sea salt caramel), so I spent most of my time gawking at the photos and statues and strange carvings from way back when thinking, how did they even come up with that?  and GOOD LORD, that looks painful.

People. People are more creative than I give them credit for. 

The journey home included one mad dash in the train station (we still missed the train), one train, one metro, one bus, and one brisk, chilly walk.

I think that Holland makes transportation so complicated in order to trick tourists into thinking it's bigger than it really is. It's just really insecure about how small it is, so it makes people run up and down, round and round so that they think Holland is the size of Texas.

We got back to Maud's apartment around nine thirty.

Special peanut butter cookies were ready by ten fifteen.

"I don't feel anything," I said about half an hour after eating our first cookie.

"Should we have another?"

"Well... they are really small..."

"What do you think?"

"Sure, let's try another," I thoughtfully munched on another crumbly cookie.

We should have just stopped there. In fact, we should have stopped after our first cookie. But I think my longstanding inability to get high has convinced me that I'm absolutely impervious to pot. So instead of calling it quits at two or at least waiting for the marijuana to kick in, we helped ourselves to thirds.

And I started to feel nauseous. Nauseous and hot and paranoid.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I shifted further onto the other side of the couch.

"What?"

"You're looking at me."

"Oh, I didn't notice."

"Yeah, you've been staring for like, ten minutes."

"Have I?"

"Yeah."

"Man."

"I'm feeling really hot."

"Me too."

"Is that normal?"

"ummm...."

"I'm feeling nauseous. I think I'm going to bed."

"Okay."

The moment I hit horizontal, my body exploded. I'd secretly hoped that the marijuana would numb the pain in my back and make it easier for me to sleep, but the result of ingesting three space cookies in an hour and a half was quite the opposite.

The heat concentrated itself in every part of my body where I felt pain. Searing pain all over my back, searing pain in my knees, searing pain in the fingers where I've been feeling the arthritic psoriasis most intensely. Like the fan from my nightmares and the Van Gogh portraits, the heat whirled around my body like fiery helicopter blades.

I felt anxious. The helicopter blades moved into my throat. I felt afraid. The helicopter blades moved into my heart. I felt overwhelmed. My spine became a column of fire.

Never before have I felt the connection between emotional pain and physical pain so directly. So intensely.

I need to calm down, I told myself through the red haze. I need to keep breathing and realize that it can't last forever. Nothing lasts forever. 

My mouth was dry and sticky. My throat felt like I'd swallowed a bale of hay. I tried to yell for Maud, but couldn't summon more than a whisper.

I didn't sleep that night. At one point, I managed to crawl to the toilet... but I had to lie on the tile floor for what felt like hours before I had the energy to crawl back to bed.

Then it was morning.

I still couldn't lift my head without wanting to throw up.

How long will this last? 

I heard Maud in the shower.

At least she's okay. 

She came in to check on me later. I don't know how much later. Time lost its sense of direction on Monday. It went backwards and forwards and sideways and then just stood still for a while.

"Are you okay?" she sat on my bed.

"No."

"Can I do anything for you?"

"Water. Yogurt."

"Do you want anything in your yogurt?"

"Honey."

"Okay."

Maud scampered down the stairs. Time happened. Then there was yogurt. I couldn't lift my head, so I asked Maud to put the bowl next to my face and I spooned it into my mouth sideways.

"Are you okay?" I managed to ask Maud between mouthfuls of yogurt.

"Man, I'm still so high."

"Are you sick?"

"No... just flying. But I did pass out in the shower."

"I wanna be flying," I moaned.

Time happened. Maud ran up the stairs. Maud ran down the stairs. Up. Down. Up. Down. Pitter-patter socks on wooden planks, thump, thump, bang, bang doors, clink-clank glasses in the kitchen.  

I want to run up and down stairs...

Maud brought me a lunch of cheese and olives and some women's tea.

"Are you still flying?"

"Yes. Man, I think I'm going to have to cancel my hair appointment. F*ck."

More yogurt happened.

Time skipped about.

And then I slept.

Finally.

I woke up on Tuesday.

What the hell happened to Monday? I feel like it just... disappeared. 

I ran down the stairs to make some eggs, celebrating the fact that I could move my head without vomiting.

I'm still a little nauseous, but much, much better. No more cookies for me. Jesus. 

The first thing that happened on Tuesday? After spending Monday bedridden and Sunday night in excruciating pain?

Shots.

 

Welcome back to the world, Bourget. Now it's time to be a grown up. No typhoid for you.

I told the doctor it was my first time getting vaccinations and she looked a little worried. She grabbed my right arm and said, "Make sure to relax -- whoa... you are really relaxed." 

I didn't tell her why.  

Man Cannot Live on Chips (and Mayonnaise) Alone -- Bruges, Belgium

Man cannot live on chips and mayonnaise alone. While this might seem like common sense to those of you who eat chips on a fairly regular basis, it came as an unpleasant shock to me. Potatoes make this lady bloat like a blowfish, so I assumed that eating half a medium serving of Belgium chips (+ half a bottle of Belgian mayonnaise) would last me until the morning.

Not true.

Maud tossed and turned with hunger. I tossed and turned with hunger.

So what did we do?

In Colorado, I'd a) open the fridge and devour some cheese or b) hop on my bike, pop over to one of the numerous 24/7 stores and purchase some bacon.

In a small hotel on the outskirts of Ghent? 

We went to youtube and watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain eating food in Istanbul.

And then we hated ourselves for this decision.

Bourget, you are the worst travel buddy in the world. First you make Tessa listen to a podcast about two girls getting murdered that night you wild camped near the patio of a partially abandoned restaurant in Albania. Then you make Maud watch an episode of someone eating simit and kebap and fish and yogurt and dates and figs whilst sleepless with starvation in Belgium. BAD FRIEND MOVE. 

Maud eventually went to sleep and I watched Anthony Bourdain in Bali. 'Cos I'm a glutton for punishment.

At five o'clock, I finally realized that there was an apple in the room.

I attacked.

Maud tossed and turned in her (what I hoped, at least) sleep.

Bleary-eyed and ravenous, we checked out of our hotel and sped towards Bruges.

"Do you want the last apple?" I offered the final piece of fruit to sooth the grumbling of my Dutch friend's tummy.

"I can't bite into apples. I need a knife."

"I ate an apple this morning."

"I know. It sounded like I had a panda in the room with me."

"Oh... man, I'm sorry. "

"It's okay. I was up every couple of minutes anyway."

We parked the car just outside the pedestrian area and then walked to a cafe I'd found during my sleepless, I WANT TO EAT ALL OF BALI morning.

The waitress was riddled with perfect grandma laugh lines and eye-twinkles and a voice that cracked just so. She served Maud her cappuccino with whipped cream and chocolate and we were able to pay when we liked.

"Belgians in Bruges are off to a better start."

Bruges (with a bit of Belgium overall)

• The capital city of West Flanders. What's West Flanders? That place on the other side of East Flanders. 
• Name could be stolen from the Old Dutch word for "bridge". Which makes sense, as this city is even more of a "little Venice" than Ghent. 
• Richard III of England was exiled here. He had it so much better than Napoleon. I want to be exiled to Bruges.
• The economy of Bruges used to be largely based on the Zwin channel -- so when this channel silted over, the golden age of this little Venice was finished. The population dwindled from 200,000 to 50,000 and it became known as "the Dead City". Then Bruges discovered tourism. Now it makes a large portion of its livelihood off of the two million tourists who visit every year and all the chocolates it sells in its airports. 
• Since Bruges has most of its medieval architecture intact, UNESCO designated the city center a world heritage site. The Church of Our Lady actually contains the only Michelangelo statue to leave Italy during the artist's lifetime. 
• Unlike Ghent, no part of Bruges is entirely car-free. This makes it more difficult to bike and less difficult to walk. Bikers are on the lookout for cars, so they're more considerate of pedestrians. However, the increasing number of biking fatalities are causing a number of Belgians to question this regulation. 
• Belgium has more castles per capita than any other country in Europe and 50 of the 470 Flanders castles are around Bruges. 
• Same sex marriage is legal (Belgium was the second country in the world to legalize same sex marriage, actually). As is the possession of five grams of marijuana (Holland isn't the only European country with legal pot, believe it or not). 
• Some very bored Belgian farmers might do this on the weekend: Shit Yourself Rich

The Irish hunt foxes. The Spaniards run away from bulls. The Dutch invented Chess boxing. England has cheese chasing. I suppose that Belgians are allowed to watch a cow until it poos.

• Table beer (1.5 percent or less) was served at school cafeterias until the 1970s. As Belgians have a life expectancy of 77-83 years (ranking #27 in the world -- well ahead of the US) the regular consumption of beer has not impacted their health too negatively. There are even people pushing to bring beer back to school, as table beer is thought to be healthier than soda. Go Belgium. 
• Belgium has the fewest McDonald's of any country in the world (per resident, of course). Local people sell their own fries. With heaps and heaps of mayonnaise. 
• Belgium makes 220,000 tons of chocolate every year. Some of it looks like this:

• These horses take tourists around the city. In Morocco and Turkey, I cringed whenever I saw horses pulling carts or carriages -- the hairless hides and the chipped hooves evidence of hard lives. However, Belgian carriage horses are only allowed to work two days a week. I hope that the other five days are spent frolicking in green fields (although I'm sure this is quite optimistic of me).

• Belgium is known for its strange statues. I thought that the confused Roman with the snake tail wolf head glued onto his outstretched hands in Bucharest was bizarre... but Belgium kind of pushes odd to a new level. The following is one of the only statues Maud and I encountered, but --

-- but then there's Mannekin Pis.

The statue of a pissing boy. You can find him in Brussels (he is their symbol, after all). Sometimes he's hooked up to a beer keg and you can help yourself to a frothy cup of cool beverage.

I borrowed this photo from Wikipedia. Didn't actually get to Brussels on this trip to Belgium.

It's funny to walk next to Maud and watch all the people passing by slow down to read her tattoo.

The cheese shop was closed for lunch (which made me think of Southern Italy), so we purchased some Belgian cheese and Mexican bananas from a Carrefour Express and had our picnic at an absolutely gorgeous park.

This is love. Maud can't bite into apples and we had no knife (Bettie went home with Tessa). So I bit off pieces of apple for Maud.

My Belgian chocolates. I did not perish of hunger last night, that's for sure. Man might not be able to live on chips alone, but chocolate is perfectly satisfactory.

Flemish waffles!

It was too late for cheese when the shop finally opened, but we purchased some boudin noir for breakfast the next day.

The drive home was long and halting. There had been an accident and traffic was backed up for miles (Maud says that Dutch people have no idea how to handle accidents. Or snow. Or inclement weather of any kind except wet).

And that concludes our adventure to Belgium.

Chocolate was eaten. Noses were dropped. Chips were not thrown.

Next stop = Amsterdam.