A nation of gin drinkers

This past weekend was the Jenever Feest in Hasselt. I had been looking forward to this event for a while since it's my boyfriend's favorite festival of the year and he'd mentioned it several times. Hasselt is known for its jenever; it's even home to the National Jenever Museum. And during the Jenever Feest the city turns into one big party with jenever being served and drunk in every street.

Jenever, as I learned during my first week here, is a kind of gin native to the Netherlands and Belgium. (Jeneverbes is Dutch for juniper berry, which is what's used to flavor gin.) I could tell you more about what it is, exactly, and how it's made, except that I wasn't that interested in those sections of the Jenever Museum and was more focused on getting to the jenever tasting at the end.

My boyfriend prefers the old-style jenever (oude jenever or graanjenever), which is clear and very strong. It's always sipped, and savored, from a small glass--no ice and no mixers. I like a good gin-and-tonic as much as the next girl, but I can't imagine drinking gin straight.

Luckily for me, there are all kinds of sweet, flavored jenevers too. These fall into two main categories: the cream jenevers and the fruit jenevers. I like both, but I'm partial to the chocolate (which falls into the cream category) and the berry flavor.

I decided to look in our liquor cabinet and see what kinds of jenever we have in the house for the purposes of illustration. Sure enough, there's a bottle of the classic old-style jenever by Smeets, which is a distillery based in Hasselt, plus some flavored jenevers. Cactus is apparently one of the more popular flavors, and we've got some hazelnut and passionfruit too.

I took the opportunity to sample several different kinds of jenever at the festival: fig, blood orange, berry, lemon, vanilla and speculaas. I also saw lychee jenever for the first time and had to try it, despite the fact that it was bright pink. My boyfriend stuck to the old-style jenever, with the end result that he got drunk twice as fast as the rest of us, since it has twice the alcohol content as the flavored ones.

Jon Stewart on Belgium

I have to post this link, to the September 30 episode of The Daily Show (my favorite American news program, for you Belgians who don't know it). The opening jokes just confirm the premise of this blog, which is that Americans know nothing about Belgium!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/thu-september-30-2010-justin-timberlake

A carnival in every town

Yesterday was the last day of kermis in the city where I live (Hasselt). It started the weekend before with a spectacular fireworks display on Saturday night and lasted nine days. Supposedly it's the biggest one in Belgium.

What's a kermis? We Americans know it as a traveling carnival. Living in mostly big cities and university towns across the U.S., I'd never actually experienced one. It was something mythical and legendary, like barn-raising and church socials--a spectacle familiar to the American national consciousness but rarely seen.

Here in Belgium, kermis is a familiar and regular occurrence. Every town, no matter how small or large, has one. Hasselt's kermis easily covers several football fields, encompassing dozens of rides, food booths and games. I went to one earlier in the year that took up one block in the middle of the village and had maybe 10 attractions.

The rides are familiar to anyone who's ever been to a carnival: carousels and bumper cars and those things that fling you up in the air and spin you around like crazy. Me, I loved seeing all the kermis food, which was new and exotic: smouteballen, which are balls of scalding hot fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar; chocolate- and candy- covered fruit, including pineapple and grapes; karakollen, which are snails; and of course fries, always fries.

Even more amazing to me were the mobile bars, which I'm pretty sure are not a feature of American carnivals. Some served beer, since Belgians always have to have their beer, but others featured cocktails and I saw at least one full bar. Each bar had a seating area with café tables and chairs, but you could also take your beer or cocktail and walk around.

The wonderful thing about kermis is that it's a civic event. Everyone turns out for it, young and old, teenagers and parents with small children and seniors alike. Whole families stroll along, two or three generations enjoying the sights and sharing the fun, not to mention some fantastically unhealthy food, together.

How to do a terrace

Belgium has two things that Los Angeles doesn't have: seasons and weather. Lots of weather. Between the cold temperatures in wintertime (not to mention early spring and late fall) and rain pretty much year-round, that leaves few really good days. You know... warm and sunny with clear, blue skies. The kind of weather Los Angeles has all the time.

So when they do get good weather, Belgians really know how to take advantage of it. One way they make the most of nice day, especially during the summer (when the sun doesn't set until around 10 o'clock) is to find a café or restaurant with an outdoor patio, gather some friends and just... hang out.

There could be a meal involved, but it could be just drinks--alcoholic or not. The point is simply to sit outdoors, sipping a beverage or eating something as the inclination strikes, but mainly... enjoying the weather, your friends and the ambiance, as everyone around you is pretty happy about the nice weather too.

In Dutch this is called "een terrasje doen." Literally translated, it means "doing a little terrace." We don't really have an equivalent expression in English. When people ask me what we say in the States, the best I can come up with is "going to a restaurant or café with outdoor seating and getting a table on the patio and hanging out with friends while having a drink or possibly a meal." The Dutch is much more concise.

Everywhere you go this time of year, you see tables set up on the sidewalk, in city plazas and on rear patios of every restaurant. Most places seem to double, if not triple, their seating capacity during the warmer months. And if the sun is shining, every seat will be filled. Now that it's August and fall is around the corner, we're already thinking our days of terrasje doen are numbered. Until next year.

Milk

There's something that has confused and bothered me ever since I got here. I thought it odd that all the milk for sale in the grocery stores was sold unrefrigerated. You can store it that way for months, and once it's opened, it will keep in the fridge for weeks and weeks. I'm not sure how long it will stay "fresh" since I've yet to have one of those boxes go bad.

It doesn't go bad because it's ultra-pasteurized; the process is also called UHT, for ultra-high temperature.The milk we drink in the States is merely pasteurized and needs to be refrigerated. It will also go bad in a week or two even when keep cold. (Sometimes cream and half-and-half are ultra-pasteurized to make them last longer in the fridge.)

Personally, I'm suspicious of ultra-pasteurized milk. It tastes weird, and--Hello! Milk is supposed to go bad! It's milk. So when it doesn't need to be refrigerated, I'm thinking that it's not really milk anymore, if you know what I mean.

The thing that's really weird about this situation is that Belgium is full of dairy cows. You can't drive 10 kilometers in any direction without seeing some nice, contented cows standing around in a beautiful green pasture. There are cows right in Hasselt, within the city limits. I figured there must be a way to get real milk around here.

I picked up a map at the tourist information office that's labeled "Fairtradeplan" and shows the locations of various organic and fair trade businesses around town. It listed one place that sells "verse hoevemelk" not far from my boyfriend's work, and yesterday I went looking for it after dropping him off at the office.

Success! There, on a main street leading out of the city center, was a small dairy farm. I pulled into the driveway and parked between an open barn full of cows standing around in large pens with clean hay and a brick building full of what looked like modern milking equipment.

A man came out of the suburban house next door and, when I said I was looking for fresh milk, asked me if I'd brought a bottle. I hadn't, so he went back inside the house and got an empty plastic water bottle. Then we went into the brick building and he filled the bottle from a giant stainless-steel vat. It cost me 1 Euro for a liter and a half.

Now that I know how easy it is to get real milk, I'm never drinking UHT milk again! I have a friend here who says she usually goes to Holland to get fresh (normal, pasteurized) milk so I told her about the dairy farm. My Belgian boyfriend is suspicious, though. He thinks that if it can go bad, it can't be good.

Hagel Slag

This post is long overdue. I can't believe I haven't written about Hagel Slag before now! (I think I overlooked it because I already introduced all my friends in L.A. to it when I was back there visiting a couple of months ago.)

Hagel Slag is what's known in the U.S. as chocolate sprinkles--the kind you buy in small quantities (if you bake) to put on cupcakes, or maybe ice cream sundaes. You can also find them on donuts. Usually they're used as a decoration, a finishing touch, if you will.

Well, Belgians have found a much larger gustatory purpose for the lowly chocolate sprinkle. Here, it's sold in large boxes (400-500 g) and used as a topping for bread or a sandwich filling, usually for breakfast. ("Hagel slag" means hail storm. Go figure.)

What you do is you take a slice of bread (or a roll) and spread it with butter, and then load it up with a solid layer of sprinkles. Voilà! Breakfast is served--or maybe lunch. You and I might call this "crazy" but I know at least one American who thinks it's "genius." A Belgian, of course, thinks it's normal.

Elections tomorrow

Tomorrow is election day in Belgium and everyone I know will go to the polls. That's because voting is mandatory here, and has been since 1892. Belgium has the oldest compulsory voting system in the world.

By law, you must enter the polling booth, but since the act of voting is still private and confidential, you don't have to mark a ballot.

After an election, a list of non-attendees is sent to the public prosecutor. Penalties for non-participation without a good excuse (like being in the hospital or out of the country) range from a small fine for a first offense to losing your right to vote for 10 years.

And unlike the U.S., which holds elections on a weekday, Belgium has elections on a Sunday morning when people aren't at work. (Very few businesses are open on Sundays here, and I bet even those are closed tomorrow.)

I did a little research online and found that voter turnout in Belgium is regularly over 90%, unsurprisingly, compared to U.S. voter turnout, which has hovered around 50% (during presidential election years) in recent decades but rose in 2008 to 68%.

You may have heard that Belgium's coalition government collapsed back in April, which is why they're having elections now. At stake is the future of the 200-year-old marriage between Dutch-speaking Flanders and Francophone Wallonia.

The AP has a good summary of the issues and major players in tomorrow's election. I'm not eligible to vote here yet, but I plan to go to the polls and observe the voting process.