Sleepy Suffolk

And so it came. The grand day out, the day we took JotaLu’s cherub, his very own talkative Ford Fiesta out on the wide roads going North.

It was late, one of those wet fall evenings where dusk has disappeared into a premature night. As often, our meeting had overrun and by then we were the only ones to go back to central Charleroi. A colleague kindly gave us a lift to the city. But not knowing the street name I had given him let alone the location of our hotel, he dropped us somewhere convenient. And ironically enough it so happened, he left us off right next to Waterloo Underground Station, on the busy eponymous avenue. Coincidence or Belgian sense of humor? Surely my colleague knew I’m French, surely he knows what Waterloo is. A Belgian city? Well… yes.
So there we were clueless, helpless, shrouded in darkness, with a mere few rays of hope emanating from a handful of shady bars’ neon signs. Theo pulled out his Blackberry in the hope of pinning down our location and that of our hotel but the fruity mobile failed us. I had to resort to pulling out my conspicuous laptop, snif around for a wifi point and go to Google maps…And Larry Page saved our poor wandering souls.
The actual hotel wasn’t actually that far off - a mere couple of blocks down. The thing is direction: you always end up going down the wrong direction lest you have a map with you (and even so, I know some folks who’d read the map the wrong way round).
So it was with much relief that we entered our hotel lobby and settled down in the adjoining restaurant to enjoy a well-deserved meal.
And being in the land where beer flows as freely as age-old camembert in France, we resorted to triying a local ‘cereal-based’ drink (does that make it part of your five-a-day?). Asking the waitress what they had, she replied the usual Grimbergen, Heineken suspects and also mentioned a scotch. Now, the conversion being carried out in French, scotch doesn’t immediately sound as if referring to those hairy folks on the other side of Hadrian’s wall. A Frenchman would probably first think of sticky tape (sellotape on either side of Hadrian’s Wall). And I thought no less. When the waitress came back with a S curve-shaped large glass containing an amber-dark beer, I read the label and immediately thought ‘darn, I picked a Scottish ale’. But again I was wrong. The labelling certainly felt from up North with a tartan-patterned St Andrew’s cross as if the beer were begging for shortcake. But the taste, the flavor, and the fizziness were altogether sweet, rich, and very continental. Nothing of the radically different insular ales we find from Plymouth to Inverness. And the head was a staggering 8-10 cm tall barely adequate for the English pub drinker (see CAMRA’s take on this).
During the later part of my meeting the following day, I started googling a bit to figure out who was behind this nifty not so Scottish (or is it?) beverage.
It turns out it’s brewed in Belgium by Alken-Maes (Belgian folks) which is owned by Scottish & Newcastle (across the North Sea). The brand Watneys (or Watney’s - I found both spellings) refers to an old, now deceased, brand of beer for which most Internet users have unkind words that I shan’t repeat here.
The Belgians, in their whimsical way about life, are probably the only ones who would disguise one of their own beers as being from Scotland, brewed locally by a local brand yet now in the hands of a UK brewing magnate.
And to top off this dizzy post (on the account of the staggering 8% alc. content), here are a picture of Watney’s ale and its head alongside CAMRA’s campain for full pints.

Now some folks when they dream of holidays, adventures, and the likes immediately picture themselves in a hammock on some remote Carribean island or in a safari or even perhaps coast-to-coasting in the USA.
All’s that nice and well but we tend to overlook our own countries - our home nations that often have more than one surprise round the corner.
Having said that, I’d like to go to a safari too. My friends at http://www.longerwaydown.com/ are doing one hell of a roadtrip. BUt with only a few days to spare, it wasn’t quite feasible.
The other thing is that one of my housemates (a dude from Madrid - poor fellow) has recently agreed to pile in another six months of Ipswich life and would therefore like to drive his little Fiesta all the way from Madrid to Ipswich. Now, to do that, there are roughly three ways:
1. take a ferry in Bilbao or Santander that goes straight to W&E Sussex / Kent
2. take a ferry or the Eurostar in France that goes to Kent
3. drive up all the way to Hoek van Holland and ferry your way across to the quiet Essex town of Harwich, only a stone’s throw away from Ipswich. You can even avoid Colchester, its rowdy military and its Essex girls…

So, JL (that’s his name) were stroking our beards and pondering on our options: obviously we wanted to taste Spanish Rioja, sip French Bordeaux and abuse of Belgian beer! And hey presto, here we were pinning out on a map which cities we were off to.

A. Madrid - starting point - in the wee hours of the morning (so by Spanish standard that’s a few minutes shy of high noon)
B. Bilbao, spend the night there, hopefully hook up with some Spanish Erasmus friends
————— the border ——————
C. My hometown(s) - with a bit of luck my family beachhouse
D. Paris, the capital bien sûr, to hang out with the BT ring there
E. Bruges because I must say the movie with Colin Farrel was a riot
F. the ferry (Hoek van Holland / Harwich)

This blurb on a map looks like this:

Ver mapa más grande

More to come…