Sleeping Around (24 page)

I gave Joris's couch a good rating, but I think Joris might have dropped his own couch rating substantially after my performance during the night. Mine was:

Couch rating: 8/10
Pro: A comfortable sleep
Con: An uncomfortable cramp in my leg during the night woke me up

Joris's would probably have been more like:

Couch rating: 4/10
Pro: A comfortable sleep
Con: A kick in the head from Brian (supposedly caused by a cramp) woke me up.

While we were having breakfast, Joris was telling me about the time he and his friends had breakfast in Belgium, lunch in Holland, then dinner in France.

‘That sounds like fun,' I said. ‘And you could throw in dessert in Luxembourg.'

Joris pondered for a minute. ‘You know, I could probably borrow Dad's car.'

Joris dragged out a map and by the time we'd finished our cup of tea we'd planned a whirlwind European culinary tour. We even added another country. We would get up early the next day and have breakfast in Belgium, lunch in Holland, afternoon tea in Germany, dinner in Luxembourg and dessert in France. The only hitch was that we'd be left with a long drive to Antwerp, so I had an idea. ‘We'll find a couch to surf in Luxembourg,' I said excitedly. Luxembourg was another country on my shortlist of places in Europe that I hadn't visited before.

There weren't many Luxembourgers offering couches in Luxembourg. Most of the potential hosts were either expats or locals who were out of the country. On the couch-surfing profiles there is a ‘last log-in' column which showed there were Luxembourgers currently in Seoul, Berlin, Paris, London, Helsinki, Malta, Madrid, Auckland, Osaka, Mumbai and Idaho.

Among those who were actually in Luxembourg there were worrying signs that they were in the country, but off the planet. Under occupation, Patrick had:

Play with my toes—does make it hard to pay the rent, though.

A fellow called Spock had:

None. Time occupies me.

André, on the other hand, had written under ‘Types of People I Enjoy':

If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, it is no matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong; their judgments is a mere lottery.

The rest of the folk that were left in Luxembourg seemed to work in banks.

I sent out a bunch of requests, then spent most of the day pottering about in Joris's flat. It was nice to do some serious pottering about. I'd been on the go practically nonstop since the start of my couch-surfing adventure and some slothfulness was just what I needed. I also felt really comfortable being a sloth in Joris's company because it was like hanging out with an old friend.

On the way into town to get some dinner, we dropped into Radio Centraal. The station was in a tall, rundown, old, gable-roofed house overlooking the river. ‘The radio station purchased the building almost thirty years ago,' Joris said as we climbed the incredibly creaky stairs. ‘It's now worth absolutely heaps.'

The station was funded by radio subscribers and the income from the ground floor, which they rented out. We waltzed straight into the main studio even though the ‘ON AIR' sign was lit up. The two announcers were lounging back in their chairs behind the console with huge joints in their hands. I could barely make out their faces through the haze. They were in the middle of playing a music track, although calling it music was perhaps a little kind. It sounded like something someone would create (and listen to) after too many huge joints. I could make out a bass guitar, but the rest sounded like stoned people banging pots and pans.

‘It's an “experimental” radio station,' Joris told me after we'd grabbed a beer from the fridge.

I don't know if experimental is the right word. I'd be leaning more towards totally weird. Joris told me about a few of the radio shows, including a weekly program called ‘Drunken DJs'. As the name might suggest, the DJs get progressively more pissed during the show until they can barely speak. ‘After the show the mixing desk is covered with empty bottles of tequila and potato chips,' Joris said.

‘We also have another show called The Essence of Bullshit, which is um . . . people just talking bullshit,' Joris said as we made our way back downstairs. ‘And we once had a weekly show that had “live sex” on air.'

I scoffed. ‘If that was an Australian show, it would only go for three minutes.'

Apparently the show wasn't that popular, so it was pulled (so to speak).

For dinner we went in search of Belgian mussels. Finding mussels is easy because just about every restaurant in the city centre has them on their menu. But I was on a mission. I wanted to find a restaurant
without
an English menu. That wasn't anywhere near as easy. I once spent more than two hours wandering the streets of Rome looking for an ‘authentic' Italian restaurant that didn't have an English menu and I ended up finding a delightful little place down a back alley which had waiters who could only be rude to me in Italian.

I think we tried just about every restaurant in central Antwerp, but we couldn't find a single menu that wasn't in at least four different languages. We eventually settled on Corsendonk Stadscafe only ten doors up from the radio station. It was a lovely candlelit place full of couples holding hands. And Joris and me.

The restaurant had twelve different types of mussels on the menu.

‘Sorry, there are no more mussels left,' our waiter shrugged.

‘What?' I gasped. ‘But . . . this is Belgium.'

‘Okay, I'll check,' he grunted, before scampering back to the kitchen.

‘We have found three bowls of mussels,' he said on his return.

I'm not sure exactly how and where you
find
three bowls of mussels at such short notice, but we ordered two bowls anyway.

As we were devouring our huge steaming cauldrons of delicious mussels and frites, I said, ‘Hmm, I do like Belgian mussels'.

‘Yes, except most of Belgium's mussels come from Holland,' Joris shrugged. ‘The Belgian coast is only sixty kilometres long.'

After dinner we adjourned for an après-mussels aperitif at De Vagant, a gin joint with 200 types of gin or
jenever
on the menu. The convivial little wood-panelled bar, with posters of aristocrats enjoying the fiery liquor on the walls, was full of locals downing tiny glasses of gin.

We sat at one of the long tables shared with other patrons and Joris ordered us a mandarin-flavoured gin. The drink was strong and sweet, but quite tasty. I couldn't say the same for the cactus-flavoured one we had next, though. Slumped next to us were two ruddy-faced fellows who looked as if they'd been there a while. They were onto their second, or possibly third, bottle of gin and were having quite a bit of trouble pouring it into their tiny glasses. Most of it was spilling across the table. When they staggered out of the bar and jumped on their bikes, I said, ‘That should be an interesting ride home'.

‘The gin makes you ride better,' Joris said. ‘And you get home quicker because you don't remember riding home.'

We only had two drinks, because we wanted to make an early start on our grand culinary tour. On the ride back, Joris got a call on his mobile. ‘That was my best friend,' Joris said. ‘He's in a local bar near my house and I said that we would drop in for one drink. Is that okay?'

It would have been okay if my one drink, which Joris's friend bought for me, hadn't been a
Duvel Tripel
or a ‘Triple Devil'. The beer was triply strong and the glass was triply large. The inevitable consequence was that our one drink turned into a couple, and a couple turned into a few.

So it was that I found myself sitting in a dank cave under one of the city's old forts with Satan and Lucifer (as well as
Duvel
there are also brands of beer called Satan and Lucifer) at two o'clock in the morning. We had been invited, or we'd just tagged along (I can't quite remember), to a party in a crumbling brick fort that was once part of the ancient fortifications that ringed the city. Although there are a number of old forts surrounding Antwerp, we knew we had arrived at the right place—there was a long line of parked bicycles out the front. Why drink and drive when you can drink and ride? To get to the party we had to follow a line of candles through a labyrinth of long dark tunnels that belonged in a gothic horror movie. This led us to a series of adjoining small, hot, sweaty and smoky rooms (the Belgians seem to have chain-smoking down to a fine art). One room housed the dance floor, but it was difficult to tell if people were dancing or just staggering about. We found a room with tables and chairs and I spent a couple of hours shouting to people over the loud music and pretending to hear what they said in return.

We finally escaped at 4 a.m. and as we rode up the road leading from the fort we passed a seriously intoxicated fellow lying on the road. One side of his face was totally covered in blood. He'd fallen off his bike. Joris asked if he was okay and he said, ‘I'm fine, but would you mind calling me a taxi?'

Maybe drinking and riding wasn't such a good alternative after all.

12

‘I like to receive and be received.'

Cecile Perrin, 27, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

CouchSurfing.com

I wanted to begin our culinary road trip with Belgian waffles for breakfast, but after our night with the devil I desperately needed a greasy bacon sandwich. Mind you, it was more like brunch anyway by the time we'd crawled out of bed and hit the road.

When Joris told me that he was going to take me to see some ‘non-tourist sites' on the way to the Dutch border, I think perhaps he meant ‘no-tourist' sites. In the sense that no tourists had ever been there before. Joris bypassed the motorway and took us down an empty road past endless docks filled with cranes and petro-chemical plants. The highlight of our tour was a monstrously menacing, and menacingly monstrous, nuclear power plant. ‘They put it right on the border,' Joris said, ‘so if anything goes wrong, half the problem is another country's.'

It wasn't until we spotted a small sign on the motorway saying ‘Nederland' that we even realised we'd crossed the border into Holland. Oh, except for the tall folk in wooden clogs growing tulips next to windmills in the neighbouring fields—only joking. We passed a turn-off to the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, which sounded like a whole lot of fun, but we were heading to the fisherman's hamlet of Vlissingen (Flushing in English) at the mouth of the River Scheldt.

‘Holland is neater and better organised than Belgium,' Joris said when I asked him what the main difference was between Belgium and Holland. ‘Oh, and Belgium has more holes in the road.'

It was only a 30-minute drive to Vlissingen and about a 3-minute drive into the centre of town, where a handsome little cobblestone square overlooked a quay packed with fishing boats. The square was home to several inviting cafes and restaurants, but we decided to go for an exploratory amble around town first. We walked to the end of the quay, where a stiff breeze was blowing off the North Sea and a towering cargo ship glided by within touching distance.

‘Over fifty thousand ships from every corner of the globe pass by here each year on the way to Antwerp,' Joris said. ‘And nowhere else in the world do ships pass this closely to the shore.'

‘You know your stuff, don't you?' I said.

‘No, I just read it on this plaque,' said Joris with a cheeky grin.

Before we found somewhere for lunch, Joris wanted to go to a ‘coffee shop' to buy something a tad stronger than coffee. When Joris asked a local man for directions, he rolled his eyes as if to say ‘another bloody Belgian buying dope'. The ‘coffee shop' was easy to spot. It had a large green marijuana leaf painted on the front window.

‘I suppose it's quite easy taking stuff across EC borders nowadays,' I said after Joris purchased a large block of hash (for 25 Euros).

‘I did get caught a few years ago, though,' Joris said. ‘On the day I got my licence I took my dad's car and, with four of my mates, we drove to Holland to buy bags of grass. We were stopped at the border on the way back to Belgium and the border police asked us if we had any grass. We said no, but they found the bags. “No more lies or you will be in big trouble,” he told us. “Are you going to come back and buy some more?” he asked as he took our bags of hash. “Yes,” I said. “Why would you say yes?” he asked. “Because you told me not to lie,” I said. He ended up letting us go with our grass when he found out that were philosophy students. “You guys probably need it,” he said.'

On the way back to the square we walked past a restaurant that was full of men wearing black-and-white striped shirts, black waistcoats, red cravats and fisherman's caps. Most of them were waving large jugs of frothy beer, smoking fat cigars and singing sea shanties while a rosy-cheeked accordion player danced precariously on the bar. ‘This is perfect,' I said. It looked just like a film set—although admittedly I can't recall a film about drunk Dutch fishermen dancing the polka. The Brasserie Sans Étoile completed the film-set picture with its rough wooden floors and low ceilings where fishing nets were strung up on dark wooden beams.

We grabbed a table and Joris spoke to a red-nosed fellow, one of the few who wasn't singing, who told us that they were seamen from a neighbouring region. They had been singing in the town square all morning and were having a ‘quick' drink to celebrate. The somewhat sozzled sailors were supposed to be heading back to their village, but they didn't want to leave. Some of them would have had trouble standing up, let alone walking out the door.

The meal servings looked huge, so we ordered a fish dish to share. The cook wasn't happy, though, and he came out of the kitchen to tell us that we couldn't share a meal. Joris argued with him and the cook stormed off back to the kitchen—where there was a good chance he would add something horrible and possibly quite gross to our food.