Belgium yum yum

I spent last weekend enjoying a completely decadent 48 hours in Belgium.  While the weekend flew by much too quickly, I don’t know if I could have withstood much more…by the end of it, I felt a little bit like how I remember feeling as a kid on the day after Halloween—so completely full of sugar that temporarily going into a diabetic coma was not out of the realm of possibility.  Belgium is a dangerous place for a chocolate-lover like me…there seemed to be a chocolate shop on every corner, each one unique and just begging to be entered.  Some shops were old-fashioned, selling traditional ganache-filled pralines.  Others looked like zenned-out yoga studies and took care to differentiate between chocolate with 43% cocoa from Venezuela and chocolate with 70% cocoa from Tanzania.  As if the chocolate shops didn’t offer enough temptation, there was also the mouth-watering smell of cooking gauffres wafting through the streets.  Needless to say, I indulged in a sweet treat or two.  Still, despite being in a two-day-long sugar-induced haze, I managed to actually get a feel for the places I visited in Belgium.  And I liked what I saw!

My first stop was Bruges, where I spent all day Saturday and Saturday night.  I had heard tell of the town being really popular with tourists, so I was sort of expecting to find Bruges a bit cheesy and uninteresting.  But instead, I fell in love with the place within the first five minutes of being there.  The town looked like pages of a storybook brought to life—think cobblestone streets, whimsical architecture, and cute elderly women riding bikes with baskets full of market produce nestled between the handlebars.  To top it off, it seemed as if Bruges was holding a conference for the most beautiful & well-dressed people of the world.  They were everywhere--strolling down the streets with their perfectly-groomed purebreds, soaking up the sun on the city’s numerous café terraces, and constantly appearing to have just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.  Maybe one could see it all as a bit superficial, but I have to admit that I totally reveled in all the aesthetic perfection.

The next stop was Brussels, capital of Belgium and of the European Union.  Brussels is not quite as utopic as Bruges, but it’s just a really cool place.  It had a bit of a Parisian feel with a funky, playful twist.  I think it speaks volumes that the city’s most famous landmark is the Manneken-Pis statue.  Brussels was great because although it is bigger than Bruges, it was still a very walkable city…which I guess is how all the residents avoid becoming morbidly obese despite all the Belgian beer, chocolate, and gauffres surrounding them.

Of course no Belgium blog post would be complete without mention of the beer.  I’m definitely more of a wine kind of girl, but some of those Belgian beers gave my typical Bordeaux a run for its money.  At the top of the list? Hoegaarden’s Rosée.  Regular Hoegaarden is already amazing, but when you add an ever-so-slight raspberry flavor and then complement it with perfect springtime weather, it becomes perfection in a glass.  Sadly, it’s only distributed in Benelux.  But that won’t stop me from having the beer I love…I’m already looking into importing it in mass quantities.  

Happy Poisson d'avril!

On a recent day trip to Belgium, I noticed something strange.  In the windows of the all the chocolate shops (yes, there is one on practically every corner in the magical chocolate-filled land of Belgium), alongside the candies made to look like eggs and Easter bunnies, there were fish-shaped chocolates.

My curiosity sparked, I did some research to figure out what was behind the strangely-formed treats.  As it turns out, the chocolates marked the approach of “Poisson d’avril” (April fish), which is basically the French equivalent to April Fools’ Day.

The story behind the day begins waaaay back in 1564, when the French king decided to change the calendar for the year, moving the first day of the year from March 31^st to January 1^st.  Apparently some people were slow to embrace the change…no big surprise there, seeing as how I still struggle to remember to change my clock for Daylight Savings Time, despite half of my appliances syncing up automatically.  Anyway, those who continued to celebrate New Years’ Day on April 1^st were mocked and made to look even sillier for their inability to keep up with the times by having a fish stuck to their back.  Some sources say that these “April fools” were stuck with only a paper fish, which I suppose is the 16^th century equivalent to sticking a “kick me” sign on someone’s back.  Other sources, however, say that real fish were used.  Of course the latter makes for a much better story, and it’s what I prefer to believe actually went down.

I guess the French have decided to celebrate Poisson d’Avril in a bit more sophisticated way these days.  Children still might mischievously tape a paper fish to their friends’ backs, but the occasion seems to now be marked more by perfectly-molded chocolates than the threat of having a reeking dead fish strapped to your back.  And that provides yet another reason that I’m glad to live in 2011 instead of 1564…