Confessions of a Catholic Carny

The porter who sold me a ticket on the train from Brussels to Ghent exhaled a not unpleasant odor of unidentifiable hooch as he spoke into my nose as if it were a microphone, advising me with all jollity and good will to pay the EU$7,80 fare rather than use one of my Eurail days for the half hour jaunt. I discovered later that the office of train porter is such that it requires alcoholism, or so I've divined after having been gassed by the stench of at least two others in the course of my travels. I have yet to test this theory on the train from Amsterdam to Paris, where I reflect on these matters as Holland rolls away to my right, but I'm sure s/he will be by shortly to stamp my ticket, and then we shall see if the dog has hair (... alas, the Dutch porters prefer more delicate scents...).

Despite what I said in my post about Brussels--in which I think I gave the impression that I was unthrilled with the city and perhaps with Belgium as a whole--Ghent immediately changed my tune. Small, old, hip, choked with bicycles and crisscrossed by canals that might as well be canals of beer bc there is an abundance of that here as well, Ghent taught me that I am old and impatient with the city (unless it be my little corner of Los Angeles) and am a man with medieval tastes. I gathered a little of this in the Cathedral of Sts. Michael and Gudula in Brussels, but only in Ghent did I realize that I want that feeling from the whole place, not from an isolated building here and there. It helped that my hostel was a converted monastery:



Perhaps it was the bathrobe and slippers that hung in the closet, which literally made me do a double take and wonder whether there were some mistake, whether I'd been put in the wrong room or would be charged for the use of their luxury upon checkout, but no. I don't know why it only cost EU$50.

With the dusk settling in, I headed into town and was met by wave upon wave of unearthly beauty, around every corner emerging some new old brick structure with crenelated towers and dizzying steeples and narrow, dark windows, juxtaposed one on top of the other in a seamless extension towards the horizon.



Along the canal above, dozens of young and old revelers gathered, seated either at cafe tables or on the stone abutment or riding jalopy 3 speeds, drinking and playing guitar and smoking whatever strange tobacco they had available, reminding me of Venice beach if Venice beach were 1000 years old. Much of my navigation has been arbitrary and directionless since I've been traveling alone, perhaps explaining why I've been lost so many times as to border on the absurd, but it has never failed to guide me in some more spiritually right direction, and in this case, it led me to a tiny pub patio where I eased into a chair and ordered a lager (I think a Jupiler, which appears to be Belgium's Bud, but good) and just observed. It seems everyone knows each other in Ghent, judging by the friendly greetings among passers by and those seated and the barkeep especially. No surprise there.

For the rest of the evening I simply wended my way through the ancient streets amid buildings so old as to make one spin, especially if one is from the comparably infantile west coast of the United States. I have no barometer to measure this kind of history. And I was duly dumbfounded. Only the next day did I begin to fathom the depth of my ignorance, my utter lack of anything like understanding of civilization's age and its inextricable and impenetrably deep historical connection to religion. By the time Catholicism came to America it had already been irreversibly contaminated by corruption and war and there was no question about its purity, if one can use such a term in this regard. But in Ghent--and this may be my ignorance speaking again--the holiness of the religion is the air one breaths. Outside of its obvious and well-documented contradictions and hypocrisies, Catholicism, in Ghent, retains some of its sense of awe and reverence, and it infects one.

All of this came to me in an inarticulate stream of crosscurrents as I stood on the top of Belfort in the central square, which faces the more famous Sint-Baafskatedraal. Since I cannot recreate the moment with the distance of days between now and then (I am currently writing this in Amsterdam--my battery died on the train--at the swanky new Bibliotheek on an inexcusably shitty keyboard), few though they are, I will transcribe the impressions I wrote in my pocket notebook at the time:

Beautiful watery imprecision of the Belfry, takes me aloft. I swim a thousand feet up on chimes.

Descending a thousand spiral stone steps feels a kind of penance for my modernness. A nautilus of centuries, a vertigo of wasted years. A cold stony fan unfurling in descent, plunging into the light and pixels of speech I fathom. The air is stiller as the bells fall silent and I break the film suspending me in alien climates. The diffused sunlight and soft breeze are afterthoughts to this cloud-passage. My legs stutter and shake, an involuntary dance of gratitude and humility.

Down here, in modernness, the renewed chimes sound carnivalesque and flippant.

The air up there and in there, and in Ghent generally, is different and evidently softens even the crustiest of cynics.



The next day I killed the morning on a bike riding up and down the canals; since Bruges is only a 30 minute train ride from Ghent, I waited until late in the afternoon to board (the trains for Bruges depart every 30 minutes or so), rolling into town around 19h00. (Now in Nice writing by the window of Le Petit Trianon Hotel with a view of orange tiled roofs and molded stucco buildings set at every imaginable angle in relation to one another, hearing birds chirp and the motherly French of the mistress of the hostel as she bathes her petit bebe two doors down--something about the cooing of infants is instantly mollifying. Shenee will be meeting me here in a few hours.)

My first hours in Bruges consisted of a now-routine amble, beginning from the city center, which here is very much like Rodeo Dr. cross-pollinated with the year 1100, and radiating out into the surrounding streets and alleys. My ostensible destination was a bar called The Crash (I think), whose allure is that "you will find no Hard Rock kitch here," just rock. On the way, however, I passed a pub in which the magnetic green of a televisual football pitch flashed through the window, pulling me into its orbit with irresistible gravity. I pulled up a seat at the bar and ordered a Bruges Tripel from the bartenderess who, although not unfriendly in any way, gave me the impression that I was an odd sight. The I looked around. All locals, mostly middle-aged or downright hoary. The three gents at the bar, already drunk and glued to the match, were obviously Norm Peterson, Cliff Claven, and Frasier Crane.



The rummy on the far left is blind and his arrival was something of a to-do. When the middle rummy saw him approaching through the window, tap-tapping his cane down the alley across the way and heading with preternatural certainty for the front door, he leaped from his chair as if he had suddenly become aware that it was made of hot coal and pulled open the door with such clumsy force that I thought for a minute that he was going to throttle the man outside, but of course was all hugs and how-d'ya-dos. Meanwhile, the bartrendress all but manfully forced the third rummy to scoot down so that Falstaff, as I came to call him, could have the prime end stool (although why on earth he would want to seat closest to the match that he couldn't even see is beyond me--perhaps to hear it better?). I had apparently stumbled into Bruges's Cheers.

The match ended in a draw, Lokeren 0 - Standard de Liege 0. Both teams are "first division, soon to be second," according to "Cliff."

Drunk and satisfied with myself for having managed to spend a night with bona fide locals--even tho I remained respectfully aloof in my corner--I stumbled back toward my hostel to the popping of fireworks and realized as I got closer and closer that a carnival was in progress around the corner (I had heard screams from my window earlier in the evening and surmised as much then), which of course I had to check out. Surrounded by adolescents and spellbound by the bright lights and the smell of fried food, I thoughtlessly got in line to ride the G Force, handing over my EU$3 with a smirk and locking myself into a seat in a row of teens with metal mouths and pocky faces and fancy cell phones, feeling not at all out of place for some reason. Then the swinging started. Back. And forth. Back. And forth. Then the spinning started. Then the speed kicked up and I was upsidedown, and so was all the beer in my stomach, and for a minute there I thought it wouldn't be anymore and some 14 year old Brugesian would be covered in it, but I managed to keep my guts about me and literally rode it out.



Even more self-satisfied after surviving the G Force intact, I took a circuit around the place, breathing in the sights and sounds and scents, and really just trying to get my legs back, and eventually made it back to my room where without further ado I passed the fuck out.

The next day, after a relatively quick tour of Sint-Salvatorskathedraal van Brugge and a hop over to see Michaelangelo's Madonna and Child (which the Brugesians are very proud of bc it is his only work to have left Italy in his lifetime, although I was more partial to the organ):



I rented a bike and stopped at the market for some picnic vittles, which, alas, I had to stuff down the front of my jacket bc I was sick to death of carrying around a bag, and which consisted of the standards--baguette, Camembert, apple, and a tall boy of Leffe blonde. Note the paunchy front, which in this case is merely prosthetic:



I suppose it's difficult to see. The bike was a three speed Oxford, similar to the six speed Batavus I sported in Ghent. Everyone rides jalopies in Europe, presumably bc of the brick and cobbled pavements, which would wreak havoc on a bike like my beloved Bottechia at home. There are many folding mini-bikes too, which the elderly are quite fond of:



I did, however, spot several racing bikes on my ride west out of Bruges (I even spotted an elusive Eddy Merkx or two) and some other beautful sights as well:



There's your windmill, which I'm sure many have been waiting for. The mama sheep was giving me the stink eye and I swear was about to leap over the puny barbed wire fence and go for the jugular if I didn't move along quickly. Her baby did look delicious, I must say.

My destination was the "beach," whatever that means in Belgium--that's what the hostel's map/guide called it anyway, so that's where I headed. To spare you the suspense, I never found any beach. Upon my return, I realized that what was meant to be a 50 minute ride would have actually taken a good 2 hours, and as it began to rain and the wind had kicked up something fierce, I decided to skip the final 7 kms or so and turn around. On the way back, I enjoyed my dejeuner on the bench pictured above, under a tree and beside the canal near a bridge where all the gunk from up-canal had collected and the ducks were walking around on it--yes on it. Disgusting yet curiously picturesque too. The ride had taken it out of me and I ate the entire wheel of Camembert to get my juices flowing again, although it was probably the 22 oz can of Leffe that revived me. After inhaling my very European picnic I rolled slowly back in the direction of Bruges, into the wind and rain, beer in hand and Godspeed You Black Emperor in my ears, a wonderfully appropriate, cinematic soundtrack to the drizzly ride. This hour-long excerpt of my three weeks away (thus far) will rank with my moments up in the Ghent Belfort as one of the most memorably and intensely happy as well as sadly brief episodes. I picked up another Leffe in Damme, a little town along the canal about 5 kms. outside Bruges, in order to prolong the rapture.

Utterly and completely depleted, physically and metaphysically, I returned the bike, sat in the Markt in the bright sunlight--that kind of too bright sunlight that often bursts through dissipating rain clouds--staring at the crowd, much of which was composed of various field trips (games of leap frog played by girls and boys with pink-painted faces), and eventually dragged my weary bones back to my room for a 3 hour nap. It was dusk when I awoke to the strong smell of garlic bread--the hostel had prepared a pasta dinner for guests who signed up, which I neglected to do bc it was advertised as Bolognese, and although I have thrown over the veganism while here, the vegetarian in me still holds fast, and of course when I wandered groggily downstairs, a little jealous of the carnivores, I saw they had written in "vegetarian available" while I slept ("Curses!" I whispered)--but it put me in the mood for spaghetti so I went on the hunt and felicitously found a place outside of the touristy area where I ordered a pesto and a bowl of minestrone (which was green (?) but delicious). I ate with gusto as I had earlier on my canal-side bench, drank a bottle of the Lambic I bought at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels, and, again, passed the fuck out.