Travel: Belgium : Brugge

Brugge, Belgium (Part 1/2) 7/31/04 09:45 am

Dag iedereen van Brugge!

Laurie and I checked into the Van Eyck hotel, where a lovely man named Mark gave us a break on our room. My gaydar has never worked properly to this day, but I think Sam, his partner in running the place is his partner. Yes, I know: There is the Euroguy vs. Gay guy stereotype. Mark has that skinny teethy Dutch face one tends to associate with Van Gogh portraits. He was super nice and I must admit, I developed a mini-crush on him while Laurie went outside to smoke five cigarettes (all at once). The rest of the crew went off on their own to get a straighter establishment, where they won't accidentally catch gay by touching a doorknob in the loo.

Mark recommends the restaurant Rockfort at 15 Langestraat for authentic non-touristy dishes. We went and had a look but the killjoys we were traveling with converted and calculated the menu prices and I ended up alongside the channel with lasagna. I resolved to go back the next night alone, without realizing that cousin Laurie had designs to get me pissed (drunk)throughout the duration of our stay at Brugge. Well, it was not as if he had to twist my arm.

Anyway, after endless rounds of Hoegaarden (too sweet), pint after pint after cans of Jupilers, Leffe blonds (the worst beer ever), cherry beer, raspberry beer, we said goodnight to the trio and headed out to barhop across town. It was great fun sitting at café tables on the sidewalk drinking and watching people go by at 2 in the morning. Two girls on bicycles asked me if I was a boy or a girl in Japanese. I said I didn't speak Japanese, and quickly added that the man I was with was my cousin. I never incriminate needlessly.

Having said that, let me tell you about my cousin Laurie.

The Virtuoso Snorer

Laurie's speech pattern is like Bach's a 2 Clav. in Goldberg Variation 26: A topic at hand is a stem of a flower, but asides, comments, confirmations, interjections, questions, nudges, branch ceaselessly endlessly like blossoms and buds from that stem throughout. It's not nearly the tempo of a Helfgott, but it's got the rhythmic brilliance of a blazing '55 Gould. It's beautifully curious to listen to, but it's also very tiring. So at the end of the day, I look forward to retreating to the peace and calm of sleep.

And that's when I found out Laurie is also the Rahsaan Roland Kirk of snoring. Now most people need to reload a mouthful of air before they can trumpet their bedsong, giving their involuntary audience a temporary break. Not my cousin. No. This man can overblow a complex tartan of sonic textures on both intake and out-take. I think he even managed to jam in a penny whistle on one measure. The hungry mosquitoes which arrived through our open window 180'd and hightailed out of there hungry: They decided that silence was golden compared to blood famine. If snoring is sawing trees, the entire Amazon rainforest would be a flatland before the sun even winked dawn away. Simply put, he is a virtuoso snorer. The bravura with which Liszt played with often prodded audience to get closer to see if his pianistic fireworks were the result of an extra hand or extra fingers. In the racket of the night, I tiptoed to check if Laurie actually had two mouths in performing his magnum opus. And that's before the talking and mumbling in two languages even began.

When morning came, and my face was under three pillows, a shirt and a towel, Laurie, well-rested, nudged my bleary-eyed, drooping butt (okay, maybe that was not from lack of sleep) self and tells me it's time to go for morning beers.

I like my cousin Laurie. I've always wanted an older brother, and I love following Laurie around asking him what we're gonna do next. He's so high-strung that when he vacuums a wooden floor, he planes an eighth of an inch off the surface, especially if he did not get a chance to relax beforehand with a cup of black Colombian java. He's a nice guy, he's fun to watch, and he's pretty open-minded. So I don't let on about his nightshades and happily drink my breakfast in a can. I then put on the tightest, shortest clothing I had, rented a bicycle and peddled all over town like a nancy boy, ringing his little bicycle bell.

The two guys who run the hotel gave me broad Belgian smiles the day after and told me separately, "hey, we saw you bicycling around yesterday!"

Yay!!!

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Brugge, Belgium (Part 2/2) : Show Me the Way to Cold Mountain 8/1/04 03:48 pm

Brugge in itself is actually a small egg-shaped town surrounded by channels, and immediately beyond them, a circumferential road known as "the Ring." It's a picturesque European tourist spot with a crowd of cafés, shops, and chocolatiers ganging around the spire of the belfry at marketplace, the center of town. When I asked about public transportation, the locals agreed that a bicycle was more than adequate to get from one end to another.

I went to Milan for fashion and disco. I came to Belgium for light. There's a quality to the late afternoons of Brugge that is unlike the places I have been to. The light basks and surrounds you. I timed my sightseeing in a way that led me to the outer periphery of town when the sun was near setting. Plastic tables now line narrow, quiet cobblestone residential streets, where locals sit for a drink. No tourists, cameras, or straw hats are to be found. A few men paint a window together, telling jokes. Children say goodbye to another: their voices faintly echo through the neighborhood while a simple church bell tolls over the roofs. I love the sound of an old bell in the afternoon.

A few lovers have a secret rendezvous at the base of a windmill, while rush hour traffic pass steadily, along the ring.

All the Salvador Dali exhibiting at Oud Sint-Jan are for sale. There are no prices attached, but I secretly wonder how a price-tag may very well determine what one's affordable taste is. It's not as if Babs Kreuger hadn't said it before. Still, I wonder how often each of us make compromises based on money. I suppose that's why people use money to distant and separate, divide and conquer.

I stop in at a few more museums, before joining everyone at the marketplace for dinner. The crew happily announced that they check Rockforts and found it to be closed for the day. So I said I'd like very much to see the sunset at marketplace, so they accommodated and picked a restaurant. I had endives wrapped in ham swimming in cheese sauce, a Belgian fare. Some street performer who claimed to be from New York City was amassing a crowd of spectators at the square. My distant relatives refer to street performers as deranged people.

Among many Chinese in Malaysia, artists and musicians tend to be looked down upon as the rock bottom caste in society. Music has its function sure: To combat, excel and open a can of whup ass on your neighbor's daughter by being able to play Persian Market faster and cleaner on the piano than she. When I was growing up, the piano meant making it to the eight level test. Translated, that means by that time, the very sight of a piano would make you cringe with nausea, disgust, and hatred, but the important thing is, proud parents could drive around with bumper stickers that read, "MY SON'S CHOPIN CAN KICK YOUR SON'S CHOPIN'S BUTT."

After many rounds of Jupilers, and an errant extra-kick beer tossed in there somewhere, I turned to twenty-something Janet, who just graduated from some London college and declared this: "Where are the Li Po's, the Tu Fu's, the Li-Ho's, the Han Shan's of our generation? We need more poets and romance, and less pragmatic walking calculators."

Much later, Laurie and I sat at a bar and watched a glazed-eyed, red-eyed, moist-eyed barfly couple sitting across from each other in delirium while a man sings Mississippi with his slide guitar.

In the lingering memory of the retired sun, a Flemish moon must have a difficult task to follow.

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