Tired Paul is no Paul at all. May need a beating.
Saturday
0545 Time to wake up. We get out of the B&B by ~0630 and catch our 0705 train to Kortrijk. It arrives just in time for us to miss the earliest train to Ieper. The last stop before WestVeltering. Paul decides a car with 50 loud, screaming, cheering, and singing young boys will be a fine place to sit, despite the 6 cars behind them unlikely to be so filled. They do some sort of 250 db cheer over and over again for the better part of 20 minutes of our 30 minute ride.
The tourist information in Ieper (Leepair) was incredibly helpful. Not only did they help us find a B&B room, they called Westvleteren to see if they still had some beer. They didn't, apparently the best beer in the world is almost constantly sold out. People come from all over, and at least as far as America in some cases, for a taste. The other trouble is finding transport on a Saturday out there, it's much easier during the week. But the Info booth people did let us know of a bar in town that sold only Trappist beers.
We headed out, and a Farmer's market was going on. I bought some fresh cherries in German, but stumbled over the word for 1/4th "Vertal" and after a brief exchange we established I could speak English, prompting him to say, "Ah, you can speak English here my friend. In Belgium, we can do everything you want."
With that we hit the Trappist pub, and better still it had several I hadn't had. No Westvleteren, but the cook was quite knowledgeable nevertheless. Turns out that the Aby usually has a reserve of their beers on tap. After some basic math we determined that it would be very unlikely that we could get to the Ably and get beer due to the travel time and wait (Usually 2hrs). We made due by sampling the Aby ale that was actually mass produced..
1500 New rule, European men are always allowed to cut my hair. Strait razors are cool.
I missed just the start of the England v. Paraguay game, which was pretty good over all. We started watching the Zimbabwe game, but decided we needed to go find a place to eat. Unfortunately almost no place was open, they were probably still watching it. We wound up on the other side of town at, what seemed to be, one of 3 open places in the city.
We ended up having lamb for dinner, apparently that's what a Gyro is here. Not bad, but unexpected.
I figure out the secret to the damn tavel hippy soap I bought. Moisten the skin, apply, then rinse. This might seem intuitive, but so Hippy is this soap that any amount of water washes it off almost instantly. Even the mist from the shower when you're not in it. Very handy for camping I'm sure. And quite refreshing as well, but clearly insane with hemp added. It's not like they had a reason to add hemp, but hippies love the ganja.
0545 Time to wake up. We get out of the B&B by ~0630 and catch our 0705 train to Kortrijk. It arrives just in time for us to miss the earliest train to Ieper. The last stop before WestVeltering. Paul decides a car with 50 loud, screaming, cheering, and singing young boys will be a fine place to sit, despite the 6 cars behind them unlikely to be so filled. They do some sort of 250 db cheer over and over again for the better part of 20 minutes of our 30 minute ride.
The tourist information in Ieper (Leepair) was incredibly helpful. Not only did they help us find a B&B room, they called Westvleteren to see if they still had some beer. They didn't, apparently the best beer in the world is almost constantly sold out. People come from all over, and at least as far as America in some cases, for a taste. The other trouble is finding transport on a Saturday out there, it's much easier during the week. But the Info booth people did let us know of a bar in town that sold only Trappist beers.
We headed out, and a Farmer's market was going on. I bought some fresh cherries in German, but stumbled over the word for 1/4th "Vertal" and after a brief exchange we established I could speak English, prompting him to say, "Ah, you can speak English here my friend. In Belgium, we can do everything you want."
With that we hit the Trappist pub, and better still it had several I hadn't had. No Westvleteren, but the cook was quite knowledgeable nevertheless. Turns out that the Aby usually has a reserve of their beers on tap. After some basic math we determined that it would be very unlikely that we could get to the Ably and get beer due to the travel time and wait (Usually 2hrs). We made due by sampling the Aby ale that was actually mass produced..
1500 New rule, European men are always allowed to cut my hair. Strait razors are cool.
I missed just the start of the England v. Paraguay game, which was pretty good over all. We started watching the Zimbabwe game, but decided we needed to go find a place to eat. Unfortunately almost no place was open, they were probably still watching it. We wound up on the other side of town at, what seemed to be, one of 3 open places in the city.
We ended up having lamb for dinner, apparently that's what a Gyro is here. Not bad, but unexpected.
I figure out the secret to the damn tavel hippy soap I bought. Moisten the skin, apply, then rinse. This might seem intuitive, but so Hippy is this soap that any amount of water washes it off almost instantly. Even the mist from the shower when you're not in it. Very handy for camping I'm sure. And quite refreshing as well, but clearly insane with hemp added. It's not like they had a reason to add hemp, but hippies love the ganja.