Field Trip! Belgium: Chocolate, Frites, Waffles and...Blackface

So, I was away on a short holiday across the sea.  I visited with some friends in London, rode a Death Coaster in Brighton (it was, erm, my first time riding a roller coaster than goes upside down, and I was disconcerted by the obvious signs of rust on the track) and took the Eurostar to Belgium, where the streets are paved with chocolate.  I'm not kidding, there were chocolate shops everywhere.  And oh what chocolate it was, ranging from the small and jewel like...

...to the abundantly gushing.

Forget the marshmallow.  If you don't want to stick your mouth right under the faucet you're no friend of mine.

Whereas the designs ranged from the classy...

...to the Klassy.

Well...at least it's multi-cultural.

The Belgians - and actually Europeans in general - take their chocolate very seriously.  The EU stipulates that in order for a product to be labelled as "chocolate" it has to contain at least 35% pure cocoa, and Belgian chocolates must be made with 100% cocoa butter, instead of the cheaper palm oil found in many lesser chocolates.

Frites are also much beloved - did you know that French fries are actually Belgian?  The story goes that during WWI some Belgian soldiers - currently 40% of Belgians speak French - offered fries to some of the Americans, who probably just assumed they were French.  The frites are thicker cut and double fried - first for about 8-10 minutes, allowed to sit and sweat, then fried again for a couple minutes just before serving.  Believe me when I say that they are happiness in potato form.  You can buy them on the street served in a white paper cone with mayo for dipping, which I never got around to doing seeing as I was eating fries with every meal.  I did hit up the Frite museum in Bruges, and was deeply despondent over their lack of frites to try.  Avoid it if you're ever in the area, as it contained absolutely nothing that you couldn't also see, read and learn by googling "frites" and "history of the potato" on the internet.

The waffles were equally lovely:

This was light and melt in my mouth, and needed nothing more than a bit of powdered sugar.  There were waffle trucks galore (I heard there's one here in Ottawa at Bank and Fifth, must go check it out), but I found that they weren't as good as the restaurant one above, probably because they tended to have been pre-made then re-toasted.  They went for two euros each topped with your choice of caramel or chocolate sauce.

The day I arrived in Bruges was Ascension Day, which is a national holiday in Belgium and, to my intense annoyance, this meant that most shops would be closed.  I did arrive in time for their Procession of the Holy Blood parade, which they've been doing every year since at least 1350.  When I walked by at around 2:00 people were waiting around for it, so I joined them, figuring that since it starts every year at 2:30, it would be only about half an hour of standing.  What I didn't realize was that we weren't near the starting point, so it took a while for the parade to get down to us.  I was standing with this very sweet elderly German couple, so I thought, well, if they can stand here for hours, I can too.  The man looked at me and asked:

Man:  Where are you from?
Me:  Canada!
Man:  Are you Japanese?
Me:  No.  I'm Chinese; my parents were born in Hong Kong.
Man:  My daughter studied in San Francisco.  There are lots of Japanese people there!  But they don't have faces like yours.
Me:  ....that's probably because I'm not Japanese.
Man:  The town where I live, in Germany, has lots of Japanese people!!
Me:  ....that's great.

Anyhow, the parade finally made its way to us, and it was awesomely, randomly bizarre.  It began with a band, horses, and girls in white dresses:

And proceeded on to Adam and Eve, if they had decided to forgo fig leaves in favour of cave man style fur tunics:

And also included sheep...

...camels...

...donkeys...

...random dude in a soft serve ice cream hat (awesome)...

...bagpipes??!!!!....

Call me crazy, but did they have bagpipes in the Bible?

...and blackface.

Sorry, was too frozen in shock to get a head-on photo.

This was from a different parade, on the Saturday in Brussels.  I still reeled.

Why why why why why??!!!!  Is it because I'm approaching this from a North American viewpoint?  Seriously, if this had happened in the States, there would have been violent rioting.  Something else I discovered this trip, from a Dutch friend living in Brussels: apparently the Dutch Santa, called Sinter Klaus, has a helper named Black Piet.  Who is a dude in blackface, wearing an Afro wig and big painted pink lips.  He throws candy to the children, so they love him, and the Dutch are very defensive, saying that it's just a harmless children's tradition.  A harmless, racist, children's tradition, rooted in Dutch colonialism.  And something which Flemish culture has at least partially embraced.

I need some pretty pictures of Bruges to calm me down.

Bruges really was gorgeous, and not as relentlessly touristy as Venice - at dusk you can walk the deserted streets alone, and watch the lights shimmering in the dark waters of the canals.

Will hopefully hit up some more burger places this weekend, and be back to our regularly scheduled programming.