Belgium

Most of our time in Belgium seemed to be spent in the bar. Belgium has so many differents beers that are way better than what you would find in Canada. Most of the bars there carried over 200 types of beer. Delirium had over 2000, unfortunately we didn't get around to trying them all. We did however get to try Westvleteren 12, which has been rated the #1 beer in the world. It has and extremely high alcohol percentage, but all I could taste was deliciousness, thats right deliciousness. Its really hard to judge what the best beer I've ever had was, especially when I tried so many in Belgium. I think it might be my favourite, but my judgement might have been swayed by its reputation.

It was quite a trek to get to the Abby which is supposed to be the only place that Westvleteren sold. We had to take a bus to get there, a bus which we had to call in advance or else it would not come. The time for our bus departure was 11:37am, and the earliest train arrival was 11:20am, in theory it should have been easy to catch the bus. Unfortunately our train was about 11 minutes late, leaving us about 6 mins to run all the way to the bus stop, I would say it was easily over a kilometer. So we had to sprint the entire way or else we would have missed our chance to taste the best beer in the world!! We just made it, I also made the mistake of eating something just before our train arrived. It was a bad idea, I did manage to keep it down which help with really enjoying the beer. We each had 3 of the beers, although it didnt taste like it was 12%, it was, and it made for a nice nap on the train ride back.

Another great thing about Belgium is the chocolate, I didnt have as much as I should have. Every bite was the best bite of chocolate I've ever had. Maybe a bit of an exageration but it was good. Too bad it was so expensive. I had to try really hard to pace myself while eating them.

Something I found interesting in Belgium was that they had 3 official languages. It was very hard to tell which one was spoken where. French was one of them, so I in general stuck to that. They also spoke German and Flemish. I could not tell the difference between the two. It seemed like in the same regions all 3 of the languages were spoken though, not like in Canada where (most of the time) French is in Quebec and English everywhere else.