How much does God love us?

This much: I had beer-flavored ice cream today.

Saint-Ghislain - center of the universe

At least the center of the Belgian cycling universe, which is a pretty significant universe if you're a cycling fan. And Belgian. Saturday a week ago the Belgian national time trial championships were held in Saint-Ghislain. Both the 11-km young riders course and the 26-km adult course ran within a few hundred meters of our front door, so I was jazzed for weeks beforehand. I even returned from my TDY a day early so that I could be here for it. We had visitors coming, too, but still...

This is the start-finish on the Grand' Place in Saint-Ghislain. Maxime Monfort won the race. You may never have heard of him, but he's not a nobody. He finished 28th of 156 riders who finished the Tour de France. He rides for Team Columbia, along with the American George Hincapie. If you're interested, you can see complete results here.

This is a couple of the elite men, complete with team cars and race official's cars, blowing through town. I think that's Sébastien Rosseler in the front. He finished second. Surprisingly, there were only 11 elite men. It is a small country. This day was for all categories, though, from beginners to pros, men and women. Even the young riders have a team car following them. But since they aren't allowed to use radios, a lot of the cars had loud speakers with which the coaches could give instructions. Most of the "instructions" consisted of "Go, go, go, go, go, go." Only in French or Flemish, of course.

One of the junior rider's was on a tight budget, and the whole operation seemed to be a family affair. His spare bike was riding not on a roof rack, but on a trunk-mounted bike carrier, nylon straps and all. And his communication with the team car consisted of his little brother leaning out the window and screaming at him.

I love this scene. One of the riders parked his bike outside the bakery, and these guys are checking it out. Last minute carbo-loading, I guess. (Good bakery, too. According to our cheese man, the baker is originally from Alsace.)

No, these are not entrants in the father-son division. It's just a father and a son out for a ride on the 11-km course. An interesting feature of a small, big-time race like this is that, while they close the course to cars, pedestrians and cyclists can continue to use it. We saw these guys, joggers, race participants warming up or cooling down, and old ladies going to the store. On the elite course, they did ask cyclists to stay on the sidewalk.

If your only idea of big-time bicycle racing is the Tour de France, this is very different. The entire Tour route is locked down, by cops, hours before the first rider comes through. In our race they let cars cross the course between riders. And the hordes you see standing on the mountain stages in the Tour? The entire crowd in downtown Hautrage consisted of the baker and her family (different baker), another extended family of about eight, a visiting colleague, and me.

Football and Beer

Noticed on a Belgian sport web site today (www.sport.be) that they have news of the MLS. Maybe the Belgians have an affinity for US professional soccer because the Belgian league, called the Jupiler League, is also second-rate.

Jupiler comes from the sponsor, which, not surprisingly is a beer. It's referred to familiarly as Jupe, which is interesting because that's the French word for a skirt. Jupe is one of four or five mass-market pilsners made in Belgium, along with Stella Artois, Maes, Primus, and maybe another one I'm forgetting. Stella and Jupe are both in the Anheuseur-Busch Inbev stable. To our way of thinking, Stella, which has a significant cult following in the US, is the best of the lot. That makes it, as a former colleague likes to say, the fourth worst beer in Belgium.

My tongue's on fire

And I like it!

I'm still TDY ("on a business trip" for you gentiles), and I found a new restaurant. I thought I had merely missed it during earlier trips, but the owner told me he had been open only 3 months. It's a Thai-German restaurant called the Kölner Hof, which means something like the Cologne courtyard. This is at least the third Thai restaurant I've seen here in Griesheim. (Who knew this place was such a magnet for Thai immigrants?) It features kölsch, a beer from Cologne (Köln), a German menu made up mostly of schnitzels, and a reasonable selection of Thai dishes, heavy on the curries. I had thood man plàa (a fish cake with lots of cilantro) and a duck salad that was the spiciest food I've had since I left the US…that I didn't make myself. The owner warned me it was spicy, and I told him I was familiar with Thai food. So he brought me a spoon. The Thai normally eat with spoon and fork, not chopsticks. They eat soup with chopsticks, which sounds like a bad Polish joke (are there good Polish jokes?), but it's because it's noodle soup and all the vendors of that used to be Chinese. So it's kind of tradition.

As always, I spent much of my time observing the other patrons. There was a table of four ladies out for the evening. At least two were sisters. Then this cute young Thai-German couple came in. They were going back and forth between English and German, and I think she may have still been learning German. But they apparently understood each other well enough to get married and be expecting. He reminded me of my pal Eric from church back home. And come to think of it, I suppose she could have been seen as a Thai version of Mandy.

I'm going out for ice cream now.

Why me?

Rita and I go for long walks several days a week (basically every day once bad weather constrains cycling), so we're often approached for directions to some place. We get asked a lot! One of the favorite destinations is the office of the doctor who has evening hours. (While she's a GP, I suspect she must have a sizable prenatal practice because we're often stopped by seemingly healthy young couples.) We've also been able to point people to restaurants, the gun club, and the accordion festival.

I'm in Germany this week. On business. Yes, we just got back from vacation in Germany, but I did spend over 24 hours at home before returning. Sometimes it just happens like that. Anyways, tonight, on my way home from dinner, a couple of young fellers pulled up beside me and asked something I of course did not understand. I fessed up right away: "I'm sorry, but I don't speak German." Undeterred, one of them switched instantly to his best English IV English: "Can you tell me where is a place where I can find Leu?" He looked a little frustrated when he got to the Leu, and since we didn't know each other's word for the object of his query, I used my fall back: "I'm a visitor here." That seemed to bring him closure and save him a little face.

If it's not bad for him, I hope he finds it.

Castles

Linderhof is one of Ludwig's smaller castles. In fact, it's only one floor (if you don't count the basement level, where the kitchen and servants' quarters were). Ludwig had a thing for all things French so he modeled his castle on Versailles, complete with a hall of mirrors, formal gardens, a grotto, and a "play house".


Off in the distance here you can see what I think is Hohenschwangau. We were on our way down the hill to Neuschwanstein so it must be the other castle. What's most striking to me in this picture is the color of the lake. We had an absolutely gorgeous day for this outing.

Traveling in Europe

Today we came home from our Germany/Austria trip. We left Waldkirch, Germany in the Black Forest and passed through the Alsace and Moselle regions of France and drove through most Luxembourg before hitting the Belgian border; once in Belgium we drove pretty much the width of the country at its widest. Four countries in about 6 hours, including rest stops.

Living in this part of Europe is pretty cool.

Who Says You Can't Come Back?

In our quest to introduce Sarah to the Germany we love (ie, make her like Germany), we took her on a week's trip to various parts of Germany and Austria. Part of the trip echoes the trip we made in September 2006 with DeeAnne and Paige to Bavaria and the Tirol section of Austria, just across the border from Germany and within striking distance of three of Ludwig's castles. For this part of the trip we stayed at the Alpenhotel Ernberg in Reutte, Austria, where we stayed on the DeeAnne-and-Paige trip. And I'm here to say that the hotel is even better than we found it in 2006 - most of it having been refurbished - and the food is every bit as good as we remembered. So good that Sarah and I had to roll ourselves out of the dining room each night.

So in this case the reality of the return trip is even better than the memory.