Bienvenue a Brussels!

So right now we’re on the train going to Koln, then to Brussels, so I’ll catch up to here.

Yesterday (Wednesday, January 18^th) we took a bus to Andechs to visit the monastic brewery. It’s located on the holy mountain which I’m guessing it’s called after all the people shouting “oh God, how long until we reach the top”. Though getting partway up, there is a beautiful view looking down of rolling hills and the church looking up. I’m sure back in the day it was a bunch of monks around their brew kettles, but nowadays it’s just the same as any other brewery. They’ve got your average people running the computers that control the brewing process and a decent sized bottling plant. Turns out that there are only six monks there currently and they hold the management positions so it therefore can still be considered a monastic brewery. Because of this, they are exempt from taxes, and use the money for their daily lives. All excess money goes to help the homeless in Munich—another reason to drink!

The afternoon was free so I spent it catching up on some reading, blogging, and German tv. Although we haven’t been able to watch Spongebob Schwamkopf here in Munich, we’ve caught plenty of How I Met Your Mother—which is still pretty funny in German, though I wonder if all of the jokes translate.

In the evening we had Kala’e’s presentation on Lambic and Gueze brewing in Belgium. I already knew quite a bit from researching my own topic on Belgian cultural influences on their brewing. I’m still super curious about how Lambic and Gueze taste considering their open fermentation traditions. I’m guessing it’s got to taste pretty good or else they wouldn’t continue to do it. After his presentation, the professors treated us to dinner at a different Augustiner location. They ordered for all of us—helles beer and some sausage platter. The helles beer at this location comes from oak casks instead of a regular tap! I have no clue what sausages were on the platter but it was all delicious! One was the Nurenburger ????? sausages which are about the size of breakfast sausage links and taste like mini-bratwurst. The second two sausages were bigger and one even had cheese in it. They were all really yummy and we were joking about how the little ones were pretty much the best and so we said it was “the power of a small sausage”—which is funny for us Linfielders because they just changed the college slogan to “the power of a small college”, only after first considering it to just be “the power of small”.

After dinner I packed most of my stuff, but had to wait for my socks and underwear to dry after I hand-washed them in the afternoon—and didn’t think about separating out my black underwear from the rest so now I have a batch of grey socks! I packed all my clothes and souvenirs and got it all nicely in my suitcase which was surprising because before it was stuffed; I am now a packing-pro! So this morning we woke up bright and early—I woke up at six—to catch the train to Koln. We’ve stopped in a few places and are about to go through Manheim—I’m on the lookout for steamrollers. It’s currently about 10:45 and we should get there at about noon. Then at 12:45 ish we catch the train to Brussels! Although I really enjoyed modern Germany and then traditional Bavaria, I’m so ready to get to Belgium for something completely different.

We’ve been in Belgium for a few hours, and it’s already so different here. Everything is super close together and all the roads are cobblestones and super bumpy. Amanda made the point that it wasn’t bombed in the war like Germany was so it wasn’t rebuilt like the places we went were. We did a tiny bit of exploring but mostly just stayed in the hotel and then went to dinner. We are right in the heart of the city, right near the city hall. It definitely seems a little…grungier here. We were told to be extremely careful about pickpockets—though you should always be cautious when in a foreign place. We definitely seem to be in a tourist-y place since there are souvenir shops everywhere. Well there is no free wi-fi in the hotel, but Amanda bought a day’s worth for 15 euros, so I am borrowing it while she is napping to update my blogs until we can find someplace near bye with free wi-fi… and then maybe I can also add some pictures.

Au revoir!