Belgium - Bruxelles, Bière et Blagues

After a quick stopover back to Sheffield for the truly amazing Arctic Monkeys gig at Don Valley bowl (10,000 Sheffielders in a huge tent, new songs were immense, met former premiership referee Uriah Rennie, all that jazz…) the weekend after was spent getting out of my German ways and heading to one of my new favourite countries – Belgium.

  Through my international friends I’ve become rather fond of countries that I’d never really given much thought to, such as South Korea with their muscular baseball players and Hungary with their lethal home-made Pálinka, but Belgium has to have been the most pleasant surprise.

  Like most English people, when I think of Belgium I think of that plucky little country who seized on a meaningless piece of paper and helped us out in the war. However that point of view often gets me into trouble with scary German women called Helga, so I needed to expand that view to escape a collective clip on the ear from the German nation. Through my friends Nada and Hugo I learned that they bloody love waffles, crepes and Nutella, that scouts are all the rage, and that they’re the kind of people who’d present an invented story about waffles being discovered by a drunken man followed by 100s of smurfs to show the foreign students what their country is like because ‘it seemed funny’. Fair to say I went into my trip to Brussels with Hun-gu with some fairly low expectations.

The thing that I don't have the skills to describe

  Well, it was freakin’ awesome. Brussels is stunning, all old squares and gothic architecture and that kind of stuff (OK, I’m pretty crap at describing things like that and will never be the next Bill Bryson, but search it in google or something because a picture tells a thousand words anyway). So that was all very nice, but it’s things like the ‘pissing boy’ that really appeal to me – a fountain in the form of, you guessed it, a boy pissing which is clothed appropriately to commemorate national days and whatnot, and you get the impression that it’s a true honour for the people of Burkina Faso when their national day of the sloth is immortalised on a bronze five year old with terrible toilet manners.

Pissing boy in all his glory

  After me Nada and Hun-gu dicking about for most of the day looking at pretty buildings and Tintin graffiti, we headed up to the royal palace for the Fete De La Musique, a music festival essentially taking place in the royal car park. Just imagine our royal family allowing a load of nutters clutching carrier bags full of cheap booze to descend on the holy land of Buckingham Palace while Amadou and Miriam play in the background and you’ll get an idea of how cool it really was, and I felt a kinship with a people who don’t really give a shit and are happy to swig beer in the streets making jokes about their friend’s mum.

Music festival, royal palace there on your right

Manly chips eating

  The next day was time to experience the Atomium, get rained on at a European model village thing (which I objected to on principle due to the United Kingdom being solely represented by the south of England and Scotland), and another thing we two nations have in common – chips. Belgian chips give ours a real run for their money, and they shit all over the laughable twigs choked in paprika that pass for chips in Germany. The Belgian versions are slightly thinner than our offerings, but fried so that they’re golden brown and crispy on the outside but still fluffy on the inside. Godly. I’d go as for to say the chips themselves are better than ours, but they let themselves down by covering them in sickly mayo-based sauce and not serving them with vinegar, battered fish or mushy peas. Close, but no cigar.

Wishing I could be shrunk to 1/50th of my normal size

  Belgium’s parting shot was the scout party. Taking place between 7pm and 9.30pm in a run-down youth centre sandwiched between a church and a school , it was a supposedly quiet night due to the exam period, but was still seriously mental. The evening went something like this:

Embarrassing myself with my pathetic nail bashing

A happy man

• Forced to neck a beer as a welcome to the foreigners
• Played a game where all scouts (15 lads and my friend Nada) stand around a tree stump and take it in turns to attempt to hammer their nails into the wood. The winner pays for the nails and the losers (me and Hun-gu, naturally) have to pay for the drinks. I guess that’s what they call hospitality there
• Everyone necks their drinks. I lose again and so have to drink another
• A bizarre chain of events where one of the scouts drops his pants, is almost thrown out of the window, and is then carried around the room on everyone’s shoulders before smashing his head on one of the exposed pipes in the ceiling
• A mosh pit to Scooter. Just because
• Kicked out of the youth club. Walk down the street pissing in hedges and throwing people’s shoes over walls
• Pick up 2 crates of Jupiler and cruise into town
• Pay 5 Euros each for two of the biggest Mojitos EVER. The deposit on the glasses alone was 40 Euros per glass
• Sample some 12% beers from the café with the largest beer selection in the world
• Almost pass out from the stress of it all, have to be driven home, and am regaled the next morning with a ‘hilarious’ story about Nada having her handbag and all her belongings stolen, the policemen being a total legend and taking the piss out of the whole situation, them finding the handbag in the band who’d been playing’s guitar case and spending 3am to 5am in the police station. Apparently I’d have loved it.

So a country with amazing chips and chocolate, 12% beer being drunk around the clock, and whose people find literally anything funny,? I’ll be back, Belgium.

Heaven