BEER!

The beer started getting really good roundabouts Prague. There started to be more body to the beer, more flavor, and a hell of a lot more options. I'm no beer snob: I drank Hite, Cass, and Max for two years. But after two and a half years of quantity in Asia, a guy can need some quality in his life.

I had some beer in Brno at the gothstel I stayed at, but I don't remember what it was or how good it was. Like I said, I'm not picky. I have neither the palate or terminology to discriminate a whole lot between beer.

My second day in Prague I went to the Czech Beer Festival with Paul and Brian. To be honest, I thought it would be a bit more showy and built up considering it was one of the biggest beer festivals in a country famous for beer.

There were four or five huge tents set up behind a small amusement park at the end of the red line. There were families, people with dogs, cover bands that sounded exactly like The Shark, and groups of rowdy Brits, but a lot of the tables were empty. It was also mid-afternoon.

The beer was substantial, and there were plenty of selections. Each tent had about a dozen on tap.

In Hannover, I think I mainly drank sparkling wine and juice that I was fed by a clutch of drunk Finnish students in town for a wood-technology exposition. Not what you'd expect in Germany, but hey, it was free. Besides, Belgium is supposed to be the beer country. Unless you ask the Polish, the Czechs, or the Germans.

Holland actually had some pretty good beer. It certainly wasn't Heineken or the generic Beer brand beer that was special, but Andy and I did get some good stuff.

I drank the zatte and the struis at the de Gooyer windmill brewpub. In Alkmaar, our CouchSurfer host Martine brought us to a pub with a big selection of Dutch craft beer. The pub, pictured at top, is underneath a beer museum. Andy and I went in during the day, but after being handed a ring of pages with translated captions and explanations, I couldn't bring myself to look at all the dioramas and photos and gave up and got my money back.

Belgian beer is indeed a thing to be cherished. Even an amateur palate such as mine can tell. We were taken out by Mieke, another host, to an interesting trio of bars in Antwerp.

First was Pelgrom, a cozy dungeon with low curving brick ceilings where I drank a Westmalle Tripel.

Next up was The 11th Commandment, bar that was fucking jam-packed with statues of Jesus, Mary, saints, and the rest of the crew. I was tickled by so many people getting drunk surrounded by so many religious images. The Rochefort 8 tasted especially good with an atmosphere of sacrilege. The 11th commandment, by the way, was to have fun. This is according to the bar, and basically contrary to the general idea of the first ten as far as I'm concerned.

Last was a more run-of-the-mill pub whose name translated to The Monk's Little Keg. Come to think of it, drinking very strong beer in the presence of piety might not be so sacrilegious considering monks make the best beer. This bar certainly had the largest beer list of the places we went.

The bad news is that it may be all downhill from Belgium. The good news is that I'm still in Belgium.

Photos!

I've uploaded more photos! I added an album of the few photos I took while I was hitchhiking. Mostly it's just boring photos of random roads, but there's a few of some crazy drunken Finnish wood-engineering students I met in Hannover.

That photo above is my final destination on the hitchhiking trip, Sean and Helen's place in The Hague. I made it, after a ridiculous series of local train mix-ups, but that's another story, and not a very interesting one.




I also added an album when I was in and around Prague. There I got to hang out with my good homeys Maggie from NH and Paul from Korea. He's not really from Korea, that's just where I know him from.

As always, the link will go on the right-hand sidebar. I'm not bothering to put one for the hitchhiking on the side, because most of the pictures are dull, and it would ruin my list of countries visited.

Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 4

I was only a few hours from Prague in Brno, and took my time getting out. A questionably gay Syrian man served me a kebap for breakfast, and I took the tram to a bus to get out of the city.

I got way lost finding the highway from the last bus stop. I thought I was in the wrong place. Turns out I was just disoriented and spent an hour looking in the wrong direction before I had to push my way through a bunch of bushes and wet grass on the side of the highway for twenty minutes, in between the road and the industrial businesses, to get to a roadside gas station.

A woman and her little boy stopped to give me a lift. She had just come back from some new age philosophical retreat in Arizona. Some weird Flower of Life thing. Anyway, she got me to a larger gas station with a McDonald's, ensuring more cars. A young abdominal surgeon picked me up and we drove off through the countryside to pick up his wife before setting off toward Prague.

The countryside alone was worth the four days of hitching. It was a bit rainy, so the rolling fields were extra green, and we curved past airy pine woods and rain-slick hamlets.

They dropped me right off at a metro station, and were a super nice couple. We'd talked a lot about traveling, their bike trips through eastern Europe, and beer. Someone's a good photographer too.

I met Paul at a cafe near his apartment, the waiter called us little girls for only having one beer, and that's where all the fun began.