The Last Day of the First Leg

(A post I started a couple of days ago...)

And so today is the last day of the first leg of my journey. It was the last day for 4 of our number, they left early this morning to return back to California. Sven is still here with me, and for him, it’s the midway point of his trip. How fast time flies when you are having fun. I feel like it was just a few days ago that I was sitting on the couch in the little house on the coast of California, writing “12 days” until we left for Europe, and now whooosh, a month has passed. Now we are sitting here in the little TV room, watching a French architectural show. A little fire is going, and everyone is reclining drowsily, tired from waking up early and the emotional fatigues of the day.

Tomorrow we leave for Austria. We will land in Vienna (Wien) and then we will hop on the train to go to Graz. There we will be picked up by our friend to go to her home in a small town about half an hour away.

We have had some exceptional meals of late, but that almost goes without saying. We have been incredibly spoiled here in Belgium, with delicious meal after delicious meal. Its been so fun to eat here. Two nights ago, we had mussels. Now, mussels is a food that the Belgians have entirely adopted as their own, and we were laughed at when we said that we’d had mussels before in America. After eating Belgian mussels, I still can’t entirely agree with them, but I will admit that mussels in Belgium is a delicious and lavish experience. 

Francoise’s mother first soaked the mussels in water three separate times. I’m not sure exactly what this did, but I’m entirely willing to trust her that it’s the thing to do with mussels, no questions asked. I don’t even care, I’d rather know the precise amount of time they soaked, and the precise amount of time they cooked for. She cooked them in white wine, onions, celery and carrots until they were just cooked. She kept the lid on them on the table until she served them, so they were steaming hot. 

She heaped big piles of the mussels in our bowls, pouring a ladle full of the delicious broth over them. With the mussels, we had frites and a Namur Blanche beer. It was a feast for kings. We all had 3 bowls of mussels each, reveling in their sweet, wine-soaked saltiness, drinking the broth with spoons, and dipping the crispy frites in homemade mayonnaise. The beer was a tad sweet, but it was tasty of course. Mmm. We filled a trash can full of shells.