Sleeping Around (25 page)

‘It's only because the Dutch don't like Belgians,' Joris sniffed.

When the seamen left the bar arm-in-arm, singing ‘Goodbye my love, goodbye', there were only four of us left in the restaurant. Five if you include the grumpy chef, who was smoking a cigarette at the bar and glancing over at us to see if we'd noticed the bits of snot in our fish sauce. Still, if it was snot sauce it was very tasty.

We left Vlissingen and headed north on a motorway that could have been anywhere in Europe. We knew we were getting closer to the German border, though. Signs for the towns of Vroenhoven, Smeermaas and Voerendaal were suddenly replaced by signs for Burgholzer, Schmithof and Gross Hürtgenwald.

It was almost four o'clock by the time we crossed the border, so we took the first turn off the motorway towards the city of Aachen. I had it in my mind that we'd have a quick look around the city (Aachen was once one of the most important cities in Europe when it was the capital of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire) then stop at a beer garden, but we were running behind schedule and didn't want to get into Luxembourg too late. We stopped at the first pub we came to in the rather nondescript suburb of Laurensberg. By a stroke of luck the Gaststätte Zur Post was a charming little corner pub and we grabbed a table outside in the sun.

I ordered a couple of Dom Kölsch beers from the extensive beer menu, but the food menu consisted mostly of pizza and a rather unappetising sounding
krapfen
. We were in luck again, though, because they also had an Aachen local specialty called
printen
on the menu. The
printen
was a bit like gingerbread, but with one special added ingredient. Concrete. I suggested to Joris that perhaps they should supply a jackhammer with each serving. When the old fellow sitting next to us heard my accent, he asked, ‘Vhere are you from?'

‘Australia.'

‘Ah, that is much far away. So for how long are you staying in Germany?'

I looked at my watch. ‘Oh, about fifteen minutes.'

That wasn't true. By the time we crossed the border back into Belgium we'd been in Germany for all of 42 minutes.

‘Have you been to Luxembourg before?' I asked Joris as we crossed the grand duchy's border almost two hours later.

‘Yes, a few times.'

‘What's it like?'

‘Well, I actually didn't see much,' Joris declared. ‘We only drove through Luxembourg so we could stop at one of the services to buy cheap petrol, cigarettes and whisky.'

In a blink of an eye we were driving into the capital of Luxembourg, the imaginatively named Luxembourg. No wonder a lot of Luxembourgers on CouchSurfing.com said that they worked for a bank. The wide boulevard that led into the city centre was lined with shiny offices of every major bank you've ever heard of. And a few that only money launderers know. The bank clerks must get hefty pay packets as well, because the roads were full of brand new Beamers, Jags, Mercedes and Ferraris.

We parked the car and strolled into the charming Place d'Armes just as the sun was setting and a rich golden light struck the surrounding buildings' seventeenth-century facades—and the tacky red facades of McDonalds and Pizza Hut. Suddenly this charming square wasn't so charming anymore. Joris was very impressed with the square, though. ‘Look at that!' he exclaimed. ‘They've got public toilets.'

We eventually found Cecile's apartment block by accident. We managed to get ourselves hopelessly lost, but when we turned off the busy road so we could stop and look at the map, I glanced up at the street sign and said, ‘Hey, this is the street!'

Cecile was petite with dark, bobbed hair and wore glasses almost identical to Joris's. Cecile wasn't Luxembourgish, though. She was French and lived with her French boyfriend Francois. Francois worked in a bank. Their three-room apartment was small and in the lounge/bedroom there was only a thin see-through curtain dividing the bedroom from the lounge room. Joris and I would be sharing the fold-out sofa bed.

We chatted over a bottle of red and Cecile told us that she had been living in Luxembourg for two years where she worked ‘organising cultural events'. Cecile had gone to university in Metz in northeastern France and when she finished her course she went to a recruitment agency and asked them to find her a job in a foreign country. They sent her 30 minutes' drive north to Luxembourg.

‘We have no Luxembourgish friends,' Cecile said when I asked if she knew many Luxembourgers. ‘We have French, English, German and Irish friends.' Francois told us that fewer than half of the 300 000 residents of the capital are native Luxembourgers, while another 140 000 ‘guest workers' commute in from France, Germany and Belgium. There were also no Luxembourgers in their apartment building. ‘There are Spanish, Portuguese and French living here,' Cecile shrugged. ‘I don't think I even know a Luxembourger,' she added.

‘I think our landlord is Luxembourgish,' Francois said.

Finding Luxembourgish cuisine proved just as challenging as finding a Luxembourger.

‘Are there any Luxembourgish restaurants we can go to?' I asked.

They both shrugged. Francois checked the net while Cecile called her Portuguese and Irish friends. Francois found two, but one was closed and the other was obscenely expensive.

‘I know a good Alsatian restaurant,' Cecile enthused.

It was easy to find a car park in town. On the way in we passed a huge and hugely empty car park that Cecile told us was packed during the day with the cars of the commuters from the surrounding countries. Although we scored a good car park, we still had to traipse up a series of steep and narrow cobbled streets that were so perfectly clean and orderly it was like a Disneyland version of a medieval city. A cast-iron staircase led us up to our Alsatian restaurant, which was called Goethe Stuff. ‘Do you get it?
Good
Stuff?' Cecile said. The restaurant did have some Luxembourgish cuisine on the menu but there were no Luxembourgish people working there. The waiters were Portuguese and the chef was French. ‘It would be nice to meet at least one Luxembourger while we're here,' I said.

I had
bibeleskas
for dinner, which was a simple but tasty dish made with boiled potatoes cooked with cheese, bacon and sour cream. I wanted to try some Luxembourgish white wine as well, but Francois said it was pretty horrible, so we had French wine instead.

Cecile had hosted a few couch surfers and she'd also couch-surfed herself in India. ‘I stayed in Mumbai with a family of four who only had one room and they shared one bed,' she said. ‘They gave me the bed and slept on the hard floor. I tried to say no, but they insisted I take the bed.'

After dinner Cecile and Francois took us on a short guided tour of the city. We began by taking a lift that was built into the cliff face just like they have in Monaco. And just as in Monaco, the lift was spotlessly clean. According to Francois some of the local banks weren't very clean, though. ‘The banks are very busy at the moment handling money from Russia and Iran,' Francois told us. Whether clean or un-clean, there certainly was a lot of money about. Francois also told us that that there are more than 250 different banks in Luxembourg and their combined balance sheets total more than EUR 700 billion, which is how Luxembourg manages to (just) beat Switzerland for the title of Europe's number-one country for private banking. The locals also had plenty of cash to deposit in their banks because, at US$48 000 a year, Luxembourg has the highest average income in the world.

For a city full of people with lots of money, no one seemed to be out and about spending any of it. The streets were deserted. ‘The locals must be at home counting their money,' Joris said. Either that or holidaying in five-star resorts everywhere else in the world.

When we walked past a restaurant that Francois frequented, the owner, who was having a cigarette on the street, invited us in for a drink. Francois asked him what the most famous Luxembourgish dish was and he thought about it for a minute. ‘Boiled tripe,' he said.

‘Are you Luxembourgish?' I asked him.

He gave me that unmistakable Gallic shrug. ‘No. French.'

The staff were all Portuguese and Spanish.

We continued our tour through the enchanting Old Town, which was flanked by mighty fortifications that were dug into sheer stone cliffs. The view from the cobblestoned corniche at the top was an imposing array of turrets and gates above the walls of the rocky promontory known as the Bock.

When we got to the Alzette River, after negotiating a series of winding steps, I finally met my first Luxembourger. He was a scruffy-looking, and somewhat smelly, homeless fellow who was camping down by the river.

It was getting late and we still had to get to France for the final leg of our grand culinary tour, so we hurried back to the car. We were heading for the town of Volerange-les-Mines, which was the first town over the border.

We almost didn't make it. Not only was it one of the very rare occasions on which the border was even manned, but the border police on duty went the whole hog and stopped us.

‘Where are you going?' the border guard asked Joris.

‘Volerange.'

The guard stuck his head in the window to check us out. ‘What for?'

‘To have some cake.'

He gave Joris a puzzled look. ‘What else?'

‘Um, that's it. Then we're coming back.'

The guard grunted at us, then turned around and called out for a senior officer. Joris explained that I was an Australian (as proof he pointed out that I was wearing shorts) and that we were on a grand one-day culinary tour. The officer said something to Joris in French and waved us through without even looking at our passports.

‘What did he say?' I asked.

‘He said, “What a fantastic idea”'.

‘You can tell we are in France,' Joris said after we'd left the autoroute. ‘The French love roundabouts.'

By this time it was close to midnight and there were no restaurants open in town, only a bakery and a bar. ‘That doesn't matter,' Joris said. We bought some lemon tarts from the bakery and ate them in the bar. Joris also bought a large baguette because ‘Belgians don't know how to make baguettes. Four hours after you buy one, you could use it to kill someone.'

The bar was quiet but it was perfect. It felt very French. Particularly when Joris asked the barman a question and he shrugged as if to say ‘It's not that I don't know, it's just that I don't care'.

Couch rating: 7/10
Pro: The bed was cosy and warm . . .
Con: . . . until Joris stole all the blankets

‘That's the last time I'm sleeping with you,' I said to Joris over breakfast. It actually took us a while to sit down for breakfast. The kitchen was so tiny that getting to your seat was like the closing stages of a game of Twister. For me to get to my chair, Cecile had to get up from the table and slide her chair to the left. I then took two steps forward and moved the bin while Joris moved the entire table to the right before moving my chair back. Or was it Cecile's chair? It took us almost fifteen minutes to get back out of the kitchen when we'd finished.

On our drive out of Luxembourg, Joris announced, ‘I'm going to take you to Luxembourg's most famous site.'

The ‘famous site' was the largest petrol station in Europe, which had more than a hundred petrol pumps. ‘Isn't this great?' Joris exclaimed as we walked past a cigarette machine that was the size of a small house. The machine dispensed
cartons
of cigarettes. Joris brought a giant pack of rolling paper to go with his giant block of hash.

Joris was dropping me off at Brussels airport, but halfway through Belgium he suddenly said, ‘You can't leave Belgium without having a Trappist beer!' The fact that I had a plane to catch and it was 9.30 in the morning didn't seem to faze him and he turned off the motorway towards the town of Rochefort.

I knew that Trappist beer is a beer brewed by Trappist monks, but I didn't know that only seven Trappist monasteries in the world produce beer. There are six in Belgium and one in Holland. The road to the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy wound its way through a forest of huge oak trees, while the abbey itself—which was founded in 1230— is a magnificent cluster of showpiece buildings from different eras where medieval stonework stands alongside antique brick buildings covered in ivy. Crates of freshly brewed beer were stacked up next to a wall of the ancient church, although there was no beer for sale in the abbey complex. We found that out when Joris asked a brown-robed monk who was solemnly wandering past us before he jumped into a sporty new VW and zoomed off, spinning the wheels and spitting gravel all over us.

We drove into the village of Rochefort and grabbed a table at Brasserie de Rochefort, where a few of the patrons were already downing beers. I was glad to see that we weren't the only drunkards drinking beer at ten in the morning. There were three Rochefort Trappist beers on the menu. The beers didn't have names, they were simply numbered: Rochefort 6 (7.5 per cent), Rochefort 8 (9.2 per cent) and the daddy of them all, Rochefort 10 (which was a whopping 11.3 per cent). ‘If we're going to have a Trappist beer, we may as well do it properly,' Joris said when he came back with two tall glasses of Rochefort 10. The beer was a dark reddish-brown colour with a creamy white head that was so thick it was like drinking beer-flavoured soup.