Have a drink!

A few weekends ago, on a Sunday around noon, I decided it would be nice to make pancakes for lunch. And what better way to enjoy waiting for the whiteish-yellow dough to turn yellowish-brown than by enjoying a beer on the side. So I grabbed a random one from the fridge and started lunch.

An hour later, as I was glad-wrapping the final few pancakes for dinner on Monday, I became aware of a slight tipsiness which didn't so much worry me as it confounded me. Maybe the milk had gone bad and was having an effect on my digestion / maybe this was the effect of a few nights of bad sleep? Maybe - no, surely it couldn't be the beer.

From a Belgian perspective, the initial interesting (and disturbing!) fact about beer in WV is that beer with more than 6% alcohol may not be sold. While this law is of course totally preposterous, meaningless and useless, it didn't bother me too much because a) I did not believe that any country other than Belgium can produce a good-tasting beer with high alcohol content and b) We happen to live 6 miles from Pennsylvania and a 45 minute drive from Maryland. (The law was most recently changed so that now it should be allowed, though the shops haven't caught up yet.)

The problem with Pennsylvania is (as I am told by the natives) that you can only buy beer by the case (or slab for you Australians - for everyone else: a 24-unit container), except for the really basic stuff like Budweiser (in which case you can buy 6-packs at bars, I'm told). So in order to get a taste of variety, Pennsylvania wouldn't be the right place to go. Hence, we teamed up with a couple of students and went on a "beer run" to Maryland. Hop across the border, buy an interesting-looking collection and hop back. As a consequence, my fridge has been filled with a quite intruiging (though currently dwindling) variety waiting to be tried ever since.

The random pick I drank while eating pancakes, happened to be a "Stoudts Triple". Now I know what you're thinking: Triple - that spells trouble. But really, the beer didn't taste like alchohol. In fact, it pretends to be a "Belgian Abbey-style Ale" and to my great surprise it smells, looks and tastes damn close to exactly that. Again, I feel a footnote is in place. Once you start paying attention, you'll find beers all over the world pretending to be "Belgian style" this or that. It's an easy trick to get sold: paste a label irrespective of whether you have anything to do with it or not. (On that topic: how many of you knew that the corporate headquarters of IKEA are in the Netherlands?) Anyway. Disappointment after disappointment has taught me to never expect a Belgian style beer to be Belgian style at all. I guess Stoudts finally proved me wrong. After checking the internet (for some reason that defies my logic, alcohol content is often not printed on the bottles or 6-packs), this specific brew was supposed to have 9% alcohol. On a Sunday at lunch with nothing but some pancakes. I guess that would explain some of the tipsiness. Joris - American Beer: 0 - 1.

But that's not where this ended. Oh no. If you thought getting drunk at noon was bad, hang on to your hat, worse is yet to come.

A week and a bit later - a quiet Tuesday evening I think it was - I sit down for my favourite passtime: reading a book with a nice beer as companion. Now since I was the only Belgian on the beer run, I felt morally obliged to buy just about all the Belgian beer that wasn't Leffe (since Leffe you can find anywhere). Consequentially, I happened to have a sampler pack of the (pretty much unheard of for all I know, but then I haven't lived in Belgium for nearly a decade) Petrus brewery - which is indeed, very Belgian.

My random pick that Tuesday evening left me with the "Aged Pale" of Petrus and to say the only positive comment I can devise, it was unlike any beer I've ever tried before. It was not, however, too different from the Slovenian apple vinegar my dad once bought in the vain hope of getting apple juice - the difference being that the Aged Pale tasted less of apple and more of vinegar. I never thought I'd see the day, but here it was: blunt and undeniably in front of me: the ultimate undrinkable (Belgian!) "beer". The struggle that went on in my head was terrifying in that it defied the only things I still believed in: the Belgian supremacy on the front of beer-making. If we cannot even have that, then what good can we do? (Well, I guess there's still chocolate?)

The dark side won. I chucked the vinegar down the sink after only the tiniest sip. And I took a Leinenkugel's 1888 Bock to replace it. Joris - American Beers: 0 - 2.


At this point I bluntly and openly admit defeat: Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic are not the only nations in the world to make good and varied beers (though the Czech republic doesn't necessarily do that, either). The U.S.A. knows quite a bit, too. I've had some really good wheat beers (which, again, say to be "Belgian style" and in fact they may well rival Hoegaarden, especially since this latter has now been absorbed into the Death Star called "InBev" - that's right: Hoegaarden and Budweiser are owned by the same company. Disgusting, isn't it?) I've tasted "Belgian Abbey-style beer" which actually emulates exactly what it set out to emulate. I'm really, honestly surprised by the variety - the many different brands, the different types available and the quite regularly recurring fact that these things actually taste right! And on top of that, I don't even think I've yet tried any of the beers Josh and Nick told me to look out for.

Out into the wild

Last week I had two days off and finally made it into the beautiful wilderness of Appalachia:


(Yeah, I only really have two pictures to show for two days of hanging out. But then there really is no way to capture these things in boring old pictures anyway. You'll have to come and check it out yourself :-P)

On Wednesday, Anneke (Praagman - should be known to most of you) came on a flash visit and brought a car, allowing us to make it to the Coopers Rock state forest: a pearl of tranquillity (which I take it is a slightly odd wording in that pearls don't necessarily have much to do with tranquility, but let's leave it at that anyway) not too far from town. After a long and tiring walk through the temperate forest on a warm spring day, we drove back to town to visit ... the arboretum - and have another tiring walk. So yeah, there you have it - visiting me does generally involve a reasonable amount of footwork...


The next day was no less entertaining and also resulted in a healthy tiredness at the end of it: together with most of the astro-students and a couple senior staff, I participated in the inaugural astro white water rafting trip! (The fact that two of the party of nine were actually plasma physicists is a detail we'll be happy to omit.) Since cameras are of course nothing you would want to bring on such a trip, you'll have to believe me when I say I courageously took the hot spot and valiantly guided my raft through the thunderous, perilous rapids of South-Western Pennsylvania. (That's right, we actually went right across the border since that turned out to be the nearest good spot to go.)

And what do you know? We didn't capsize, I didn't fall out (even though the front seat didn't really have any hooks for my feet - or any support at all, for that matter), didn't bash my head against the rocks we glided past and I still do not regret choosing the cheapest health-care plan. All in all it was a nice experience, floating down the river through the forests, seeing the imaginary natives of centuries past sneak through the bushes in hunt for turkeys and black bears. Noticing the settlers arrive at the river - yet another obstacle to overcome. Finding a derailed railway carriage and deducing from the large trees that stand all around it, that it must have lain there for quite some time - perhaps ever since the robbers of the West - the American Ned Kellys - put up a scheme and grabbed whatever was there. Or ever since a tree came down as the train thundered past, though such realistic explanations of course don't rouse my fascination and imagination quite as much.

I must admit, the landscape here never fails to get me dreaming. It must be incredibly easy to write a historical novel about life in the Americas in times past, because the imagery is all right there: the trees, streams, mountains - granted, there's the occasional power line, but apart from that - there's so much room down here! There are so few people on such a massive continent... And so much has happened so recently!

If you think I'm losing it again, consider this: in the BeNeLux, there are on average 371 people per square kilometer. While Australia is a whole lot less dense, Melbourne sure isn't. In West-Virginia, that number is 29 - more than ten times less! On top of that, Flanders fought the French in 1302 - and we still talk about it. My little country back home has of course been the field for many other armies to fight, from Waterloo to WWII. But that's all messy warfare - one ruler comes, throws out the previous one, raids our churches, steals our art and takes whatever taxes he can before the next invader comes knocking. To my mind, Belgian history is the boring constancy that primary school history lessons are composed of.

Not so with North-America. This is the land where Winnetou once roamed the plains. The land where famished Irish built a new life on their up-and-at-them attitude. The place where strong men delivered ad-hoc justice, mounted on their fierce stallions and sporting the guns that defended the weak and harmless. This is the land where a Don Quixote could be brave and valued without needing to be mad. Forgive me for being entirely unrealistic, but it's true that America is the continent of which we read fascinating stories and see exciting movies.

Of course I know that country (which must have been much harsher and probably didn't have any of the romanticised titbits Karl May and Clint Eastwood would have us believe in) has long since disappeared: nobody lives randomly in the wild - except for campers, like everywhere else - and there are no settlers trekking through the wilderness: settlers these days have a 4WD and airplanes. But there's so much unspoiled, free, empty and (in sharp contrast to most of Australia:) livable land around here that I keep on being reminded of those stories of old - the great promised land out West. So as mad as I may be, please don't blame me for continuing to expect finding John Wayne besides a camping fire every time I see a creek or a rotting tree trunk.

Living the good life

When I first arrived in Australia in 2004, it didn't take 12 hours before I was told of the drought and reminded to keep shower time down. In subsequent years, the concept of a filled bath tub became - slowly but surely - relegated to the realm of science fiction. And it doesn't look like this was just because of the few strange people I fell in with: after nearly four years in the country, I'm just about convinced that the nation - and especially the big cities - are obsessed with saving water.

Yet, water isn't where it ends. As the elections loomed and environmental concern reached the political agenda, televisions were struck with government-funded adds that seemed to have the single purpose of making us feel guilty of using any electricity at all: switch on lights, TVs, microwaves or alarm clocks and black balloons of doom would fill your house: the CO₂ is everywhere and it will kill you. (This purpose was of course secondary to trying to convince the electorate that Howard was good for them. As good as CO₂, if you ask me.)

Such guilt-ridden consumerism (aka the idea that anything beyond sitting in a cave is bad for the Earth and will destroy your kids and grandkids if not yourself), is of course nothing new to me: one doesn't have to live in an extremist-Calvinist community to be made aware of the dreadful things we do to our planet and how this will curse us in the end. As a point of illustration, one of the few things I remember from primary school is how we were told of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest for the dual benefit of quick gain from tropical wood sales and opening up of cheap pastures to breed McDonalds-cows. I've been ingrained by obsessive-compulsive turning off of lights, closing of dripping taps and taking trains not cars. However, environmental concerns aren't the end of this, either: the government and lobby-groups go through quite some effort to push us into the correct straightjacket: extensive advertising campaigns have left me incapable of considering driving and drinking (however little) on the same night. It's an interesting life, which is guided by reflexes of guilt.


Down here, I haven't detected much of that. In contrast to the Australian balloons of doom, here I've seen car stickers praising the merits of coal ("coal forever!") and the secretary of the interior explains on prime-time television that limiting the consumption of coal is simply not something worth thinking about. Here, people have figured out that it's so much easier to go by car than by any other means, so why wouldn't we? And if you've had a few to drink - hey, as long as you know what you're doing and you've got a big enough 'truck' to feel safe, what could go wrong?

Don't worry about long showers or filling bath tubs - in fact, the shower knob doesn't even allow me to adjust the volume of water, so maybe a full-blown bath may be more economical after all! Also, you shouldn't feel obliged to fill your kitchen with fifteen different trash bags: just put it all in a single one, it isn't really your problem what happens to it, after all - that's why you pay bills for trash collection, right?

Another one: why would you go through the effort of buying groceries, cooking and doing dishes (or, rather, filling the dish washer) every day? Eating out is cheap, yummy and fast. Surely in a time and place where time is money, you'll just pop by Subway or KFC after work? There's no need to panick about refilling your drink during dinner, either - while in Belgium the biggest cost of eating out is often that second Coke you've ordered, in the US (or at least in Morgantown), refills are free.

In fact, to come down to the most nitty-gritty details: my age-old obsession with not choking the kitchen sink is rendered worthless by the mechanical cutter-device installed underneath. Drop anything you like down the sink, if it gets stuck you simply flick the switch and along with the whirring noise, the water level will drop again.


Of course the above is a bit of a caricature: I've seen water wasted in NSW and know plenty of Belgians who wouldn't give a light switch a second thought. On top of that, I've only lived here for 3 months so the few Americans I know and an out-of-context quote from the secretary of the interior may not really paint a convincing picture. But even so, I cannot escape the feeling that the USA isn't only pervaded with a feeling of opportunity and optimism, but also of an attitude to live the good life. And take it or leave it, there's a lot to be said in favour that.