Cairns

Last week I was walking through the streets of Antwerp with a friend who has a very strong penchant and deep knowledge of gemstones. Now that sounds innocuous enough, but what it led to was a very eye-opening experience for me.

Why?

Because I thought I knew Antwerp rather well and am aware of many of the shops, boutiques, restaurants, art galleries, etc. But, what happened was that because of listening to someone else’s interest, we ended up going to a whole different Antwerp than I had been to, but all the while being exactly in the same Antwerp that I have always walked through.

In essence, I had been walking by some very fascinating shops for years and never going in, sometimes perhaps out of just habit of knowing my favorite places, or sometimes just not recognizing what is right in front of your eyes. It is the cliché of driving down a road and suddenly realizing you have gone a mile and don’t remember any of it because you always drive down that road and your “subconscious” driver takes over.

As such, throughout the day, little cairns of memories were placed along familiar routes, marking new places and points of interest that I will be sure to view next time and more importantly gave me the awareness to keep my eyes open for new ones.

Every city has multiple dimensions, layers upon layers, like a sedimentary rock, and as with Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, it is for us to dig through and find the layers and be aware of the rifts. Many of us, myself included, merely walk along the surface each day, and yet, just below, there are new worlds to be discovered, or like the theoretical pocket universes that could be all around us, but we must be willing to look for them.

Whale Songs

Last night after I went to see a movie I came out into the frigid Antwerp, winter air to catch a bus back home, though I missed it by just a minute, and the next one was not for another twenty minutes. As it was well below freezing, I figured that walking along the bus route would be better than standing still at a single bus stop, so I set off. As I was at the Centraal train station, the bus route runs southerly down the spoorweg (tracks) of the trains. Centraal station is one of the most beautiful train stations in the world, and has many times over been voted as such. Though I know that there are many main world train stations I have not yet been to, of those dozens that I have (and several on the top 10 list), Antwerp’s definitely deserves such praise.

Inside, its main foyer is reminiscent of a large Baroque cathedral, though with a lofty domed ceiling, so, like much of Antwerp’s architecture, it is a mixture of aesthetics. The train galley itself is nothing short of stunning, with high, vaulted glass and steel walls and ceiling rising far above the trains, dwarfing them to look like toy trains a child might play with. The space is daunting even more so now that they opened up two lower layers to accommodate the high-speed trains on the lowest level and mid-city trains on the second, while the more regional ones are often on the top level, so as not having to travel underground for any period of time.  

Like many major train stations, it originally was a terminus, where all the trains had to stop, and then later reverse direction to depart. The two lower levels now make Antwerp a mere on/off place where trains traveling from Paris can merely stop, unload and then close the doors and continue on in the same direction towards Amsterdam, for example. However, the top level is still a terminus, with enormous shock absorbers at the end of each spoor (track) in case a train’s brakes are not sufficient to stop it, or perhaps a miscue by an engineer.

But, it is not just the inside of the train station that is so impressive. The entire structure has just completed a 15-year renovation on all levels, and that includes one of its most impressive features, the nearly two mile elevated stone structure that leads all departing tracks to Berchem station. For the entire length of this route, the elevated rail system is supported by a series of arches and is capped off with what looks almost like a fortress complete with small towers every some-odd meters. It is something very easy to take for granted on a daily basis, but when you really appreciate the vastness of this rail system, it is quite impressive.

As I was then walking along, just reaching the part where the trains come in, I heard the song of the rails. There have been lots of songs written about trains, mostly nostalgic, such as Steve Goodman's “City of New Orleans,” bemoaning the end of an era. However, the real music of trains is the trains themselves. I am glad that my daughter has had the chance to experience the enchantment of trains, and though they are no longer the old steam engines, every now and then, one will pull into Antwerp’s Centraal, and then one can really imagine the excitement and awe of a train. The blast from a steam-engine train at full throttle inside the station is one of the loudest things I have ever heard. That, too, is music, not just the pleasant clickity-clacks along the tracks. Also, the exhaustive decompression of the airbrakes from the hulking beasts, waiting their turn to get back on the way. The whistles of the conductors. The hissing of the hydraulics opening and closing the doors. The echoes of travelers, commuters, and vagabonds. The indecipherable blasts over the intercom of inevitable track changes. All of this is one big cacophonic masterpiece.

However, the one part of this music I love best is the haunting whale songs of the trains coming in, with their brakes grinding and when the metal on metal of the wheels to the tracks hits a certain frequency, you can imagine these trains singing like two giant blue whales under the ocean to each other. It is eerie, and on a night like last night, when the rails were very cold, and the trains coming in began the approach, this banshee-like baleen opera begins, and literally gave me chills, and that was not just the freezing wind at my back. The moans and groans of the friction were sublime.

It reminded me of the first time that I came to Antwerp over 20 years ago (actually, the second time, but the first time to live here). I was part of a European Studies program for languages and literature and I arrived early to check out the town. As I was not affiliated with a school at the time, I had to secure my own lodging for the year. I had booked myself into a youth hostel in the meantime while I was searching. Though called a youth hostel, it was actually more of a half-way house for Northern African Muslims from Morocco, Tunisia, Tangiers, Libya, and so forth. I am pretty sure I was about the only Westerner there that week. So, it was a bit of a shock to check in, and whenever I told people where I was staying, they looked at me as if I had lost my mind (I get that a lot).

To get there, I had to walk along this same track system. However, in 1992, no renovation had begun, and Antwerp was a bit more of a backwater, grimy port city than the world city it is again today. 500 years ago, Antwerp was THE city, but it fell to shambles for a couple hundred years. Regardless, it was pretty grimy and impressive not for its beauty, but for its decay along this mighty railroad. I was also staying on “the wrong side of the tracks.” It gave me an impression of Antwerp that most of the other students in the program never saw, and at present cannot see in that part of town. Yet, what remained the same, was I was just as transfixed by the sounds of the trains above me. So, much may change, but there is always something at the core in which the song does remain the same.

River Swells.

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s...

So “begins” Finnegans Wake, or at least the first five words that one encounters when opening the book.

Finnegans Wake, or simply, the Wake as it is most often referred to amongst Joyceans (namely those of us hopelessly afflicted by being aficionados of the Irish Bard...) is arguably the most important book in my life. Or, at least one of them, but its presence in my life is ominous, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Likewise, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha shares the literary pole position in my heart for favorite books. Both could not be more different, yet more the same, so it goes. The former is considered the most difficult, confounded, self-absorbed, narcissistic exercise in futility of language, while the latter is often scoffed at being too simplistic, naïve, and claiming to be a quest for losing the self, becoming the anti-narcissistic book. So, what then do they have in common? All, and no-thing, but most importantly, they are both about a river.

Joyce’s postmodern linguistic Frankenstein is topically about the River Liffey that runs through Dublin, though simultaneously about every river on the planet, condensed into no less than 800 different rivers in the well-known chapter on ALP, the universal Mother. Siddhartha, on the other hand is a “tale from old India” with a focus on an unnamed river, which teaches Siddhartha the magical power of the sacred syllable “OM.”

When I was young-er (I still feel young, despite being 42), and dumb-er (still dumb, but just aware of it now), then I gave a talk in Zürich, Switzerland at a Joyce Symposium, my first of many to follow over the years, about the relationship between the Wake and Siddhartha, arguing that they were more or less the same book, just different.

Having given, what I thought was a dazzling presentation for a young whippersnapper, complete with one of my in/famous Fulton diagrams (if you know me, this needs no further explanation, though I will post a picture of the original when I can find it again for a visual aid), I put down my felt-tipped marker and waited for shouts of “bravissimo, bravissimo, encore, encore.”

Rather, silence. Crickets more like. Only, unlike Beethoven , I wasn’t deaf, it truly was silent.

Now, silence is good and bad, and with a presentation, there is a fine line between death and victory, a hair’s breadth.

The silence was broken by Fritz Senn, the über-Swiss Joycean, who is in/famous for making or breaking young Joyceans on the spot, the former usually being sprite, young good-looking female Joyceans, the latter often look more like me.

In his typical faux-Socratic self-deprecating irony , Mr. Senn threw out this chestnut, more or less, as such, saying, in his Swiss manner, “Now, it is my humble opinion, and I don’t claim to know anything about anything, but there is one thing that I have noticed about the Wake and that is that there is a uncanny ability for people to talk a great deal about the Wake, but actually not understand it at all.” That was the first and last comment of the presentation, and I sat down.

Well, some twenty years later, having worked much more extensively on Joyce and having read Siddhartha several more times (I taught myself German to read it in the original, so it must be important to me), I would give the exact same presentation, the echoes of Mr. Senn’s deprecation notwithstanding.

Which was: the two books are the same, and they are about a river, and in that river, everything happens all the Time at all Times and covers all Space and it is contained in the sacred syllable OM, though protracted to the tesseract of A-U-M-Silence (hence I tell myself the silence at the end of my presentation was actually fortuitous...always look on the bright side of life, “whistle, whistle/whistle, whistle”) as described in the Advaita Vedanta classic, the Mandukya Upansihad...

Sunday was a beautiful day in Antwerp. Though 99% of the denizens might disagree evinced by the dearth of human beings out that morning, I found it to be phenomenal, to use my daughter’s favorite adjective.

It was very cold, grey and foggy as Dickens’ London. I was tooling around my bike in the Waste Land of avenues and streets and ended up on the banks of the Schelde, the river that made Antwerp a viable metropolis for hundreds of years. Down towards the South, where it becomes more river and less commercial property, I sat by the river, and wept silently, though not out of sadness.

Sitting there for some indefinite amount of Time, watching the muddy swells roll plashing against the nearby hull of the good ship Helenic, listening to the plaintive, feline calls of the gulls, and feeling the cold, damp caress of fog on my cheek, I sat, and tears did in fact come to my eyes, though I did not even notice when, how, or why, yet, I wasn’t sad, not at all, but rather I just was, and I was indeed a lone a long the... 

God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream?

Several years ago, when we moved back to Antwerp from Austin, Texas, I was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the Universiteit Antwerpen. How I ended up there is a story in itself, having been a foreign exchange student nearly twenty years prior, with the same professors who were now my colleagues, during which I began my lifelong (from that point at least) love affair with languages and James Joyce. But, that, as the talking tree, the Sprookjesboom says, “dat, lieve kinderen, is een héél ander verhaal...”

One of the courses that I taught was called, “God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream?” I had been asked to teach a course on American Drama, something I had never done before, so I put on the old thinking cap, and I thunk, and I thunk, and I thunk.

What defines America?

The time period was in and around the two World Wars, and I had chosen Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

And, like casting the runes or spreading the Tarot Cards, the answer emerged: God, Fear, and Booze. And, of course, the American Dream, or was it?

Living and traveling abroad I am constantly confronted with stereotypes, both ones about Americans and ones that I have as an American about others, say, for example, Italians, Belgians, and Indians, just to name a few. Stereotypes raise the hackles of many immediately, but, in a sense, they can be useful. An incorrect stereotype is just as helpful in learning about a culture as a correct one, just as a negative experience can teach us as much as a positive one.

So, that was the course. The first day, not wanting to be shy, we dove right in and I asked the students, who were all Belgian, what stereotypes do you have about America and Americans?

Some of the answers which filled the chalkboard:

Obsessed with Religion

Christians

Drink too much when they come to Europe

War (there was another President in the White House at the time)

Xenophobia

Ignorance of geography

Hollywood endings

Problems with Racism

Freedom

Skyscrapers

The American West

Cowboys and Indians

In short, God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream? I was not too much off the mark. Americans drink a lot of alcohol, both at home and abroad. Americans are quite preoccupied with Religion, specifically Christianity, and we Fear the Unknown as much as anyone, yet, behind it all, there is the promise of the American Dream. I can do anything that I put my mind to.

When people meet me, they will often say, “You’re not a typical American, are you?” To which I usually answer, “Yes and No.”

Personally, I have had my battle with booze, though have come out victorious . Questions of religion and spirituality are on my mind constantly, but not necessarily Christianity. I have had to conquer many fears in life, and have had to overcome prejudices and stereotypes of the Other, and I have learned about three different cultures on a deeper level than even some of the people born and raised in those cultures. I have believed in the American Dream and I have lived it, and I have seen it falter at times.

Much has happened in my life since I taught that course. I have lost much, and perhaps, in some ways, I have gained more. I have wrestled with the demons of my mind, of being American , of being a foreigner, of being a Man, of being a Human, of just Be-ing.

And, now, here I am, back in Antwerp having spent a phenomenal 10 weeks in India , which suddenly, like the thick mist of today’s autumn shroud, floats ghostly before my eyes, flickering. shifting, changing, fading, and eliding my thoughts, taking me back to that first day in the classroom, asking the question, “so, what comes to mind when you think of America?” Because, suddenly, again I am here, back in Antwerp, as an American, coming equipped with a bit more experience in life than when I left it in August.

For logistical reasons, Antwerp, or at least Belgium is my home for the indefinite, foreseeable future. I am a foreigner, and I am an American, living abroad. But, I have returned to Antwerp with perhaps a new pair of glasses, or better, a lack thereof. It is a new city for me. Though it has been part of my history, suddenly it opens before me, new, to be dis-covered, to be experienced from a new perspective.

I am American. I am a typical American, both in my typical and atypical ways. It is who I am, and it is who I will be when I die. For, to be paradox of a stereotype is about as American as it can get, and so, here I am.

Één April, let me bake you a fish

Today is April 1st, or in America, April Fools Day. In Antwerp, however, they have a different expression. An April Fools' Day joke is called an aprilvis, or, an "April Fish". Of course, it all makes sense, right?

However, it is not just the Belgians who call it this, but the French have the phrase, un poisson d'avril, and when we were living in Italy, we found out that the expression is un pesce d'aprile, both meaning simply an "April Fish". The origin of this supposedly has to do with the fact that April is the end of Pisces, but there are conflicting accounts of this. Regardless, the stock prank that was part of the tradition was to attach a dead fish to your buddy's back and ask if he had seen the fool/fish. Lots of fun was had and merriment all around at the expense of the poor sap with a smelly fish on his back. Oh, these Europeans, the fun never ends.

In modern times, the dead fish has been replaced with a paper one, and it is usually left up to the little ones to do the dastardly deed of pasting one of these fish on the unsuspecting target. But, the phrase has been extended to mean any April Fools' joke, so whenever you do play a joke on someone, you are said to be  "een aprilvis bakken," or baking an April's Fish for that person. 

Although I have not seen any real or paper fishes stuck to anyone's back, you are very aware that today is April Fools' Day, which brings us to our next topic, Flemish humor. Beware, if you are politically correct-sensitive, it is probably best to stop reading now and join us next time. 

In Antwerp, one of the main Flemish newspapers is the Gazet van Antwerpen. Today, the entire issue was renamed the Gazet van Geert Hoste. Geert Hoste is a street performer turned national phenomenon as is his niece Phaedra Hoste who has her own reality show as an ex-model picking a boyfriend from 12 men. (Her decision was made last night and was the bunt of many baked fishes in the newspapers.) More important, Geert Hoste (as is Phaedra) is a BV, or Bekende Vlaming, which means a "famous Fleming". The BVs will get their own post, but let me assure you, when you become a BV, you never pay for another meal as long as you live. My goal is to become a BVV, or Bekende Vlaamse Vreemdeling, or Famous Flemish Foreigner (my own invention, of course), but again, all of this is for a future post.

Back to Geert Hoste. Going from a street mime (another future post as well) to the country's most recognized comedians and political satirist, Hoste's bald visage is seen all over Flanders. So, when the GVA was to be edited by Hoste, it was big. This morning I sat in a cafe and decided to check out this special edition of the GVA. I was expecting a few gag articles here and there, but as I said, the entire newspaper was a gag, complete with 25 Flemish comedians serving as the editorial staff for the day. The Flemings like to stretch a joke.

On the cover was a picture of the new (this adjective will take on much more weight when I write about it) Belgian government with all of the members' heads photoshopped to be bald, like Hoste. However, look closely, there is one man with hair still, hmm..., who is it? King Albert, no less. I guess defacing royalty is still off limits, but as you look through the pages, apparently nothing else is sacred or taboo. 

For example, Yves Letterme, the new Prime Minister, and embattled figure over the past nine months, is linked to a story about a pregnant goat, by him. OK, can you imagine if on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper there was a story that the President of the United States had impregnated a goat? That was just the beginning. 

Belgium has had a few very disturbing paedophile/murder cases over the years and currently there is a new monster on trial, named Michel Fourniret, who along with his wife terrorized French/Belgian border for some time with their crimes. When arrested, he boasted that he was "worse than Dutroux," referring to Marc Dutroux, one of Belgium's most despised criminals. In the section of the GVA in which the Fourniret case is usually reported, there were the satires as well. One of the columns said the Dutroux responds in anger that he is "worse than Fourniret" and so on. In the back of the paper, the various writers discussed the difficulty about their assignments, including the one who wrote about Fourniret. He lamented that it was difficult not to hurt anyone when writing about such things. Well, I'm not sure that this was worth putting that to the test, but the sensibilities of others is quite different sometimes. I am not sure how it will be received, but you will see things get to print here that would normally not make it in the the States.

If you followed, for example, the protests surrounding a Danish cartoonist, who a few years ago depicted the prophet Mohammed with a ticking bomb in his turban, then you know how powerful these editorial decisions become. I have seen several political cartoons here that refer to religion or specific people that would never see the light of day in a major American newspaper,  but are common here. 

The question here then, is whether this is a good or bad thing. When I was teaching American students in Italy a few years ago for a study abroad program, they were shocked at the images in the newspapers and on the news regarding the Iraq war/occupation/insurgency (choose your position). Gruesome pictures of the reality of what was going on would hit the front page. These pictures never made it to America. I asked many people living in the States if they had seen them, and no one had. The news is quite a different animal here. Is censorship sometimes necessary, or should such images/satire be allowed? 

The simple figure of the April Fish opened up these questions again for me as I read through the paper. America is apparently based on freedom of speech and the press so long as it does not hurt someone, but where is that line drawn? Is it drawn too quickly? Should we offend people more often to make them think? 

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 tells of the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman in the not-so-distant future. The firemen in the story are those who start the fires, not put them out. When someone is caught reading a book, he or she is usually turned in by a neighbor or family member and the firemen are called in. The house and the belongings are all burned, sometimes with the occupants. But, how did it come to this?

The disturbing answer that Bradbury gives is that it is from the inside, not from the government down. Gradually, people could no longer write books because ultimately you would eventually offend someone, somewhere. As such, books began to be banned and only graphic comics novels and celebrity magazines were allowed. All "serious" books which led to thinking or controversy were banned, and houses burned. The inhabitants of this society entertained themselves continuously with "shell-like" earphones and reality TV shows on giant plasma like screens. But, this is just fiction, right?

The GVA was not the only paper to do this guest editing, but several other Flemish papers joined in. Across the country, jokes about people getting busted at Nazi-sex parties and Leterme's troubles with his pregnant goat were everywhere. Satire is a tricky thing. When things get really bad, it is perhaps the only tool for writers because serious thinkers are easily dismissed. Think Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. In Roman times, the art of satire was taken quite seriously and people such as Juvenal were widely read.

When we think of April Fools, it is usually a simple joke, but when the GVA decided to bake an aprilvis with Geert Hoste, they opened up a real can of worms. I am curious to see how it is received, or, if it is even noticed as nothing more than another example of the peculiar Flemish humor.

Frituur Number 1

To begin our journey into the Belgium universe, we need to address the burning question of Fries with Mayonnaise. When John Travolta made his stunning comeback in Pulp Fiction, the world was confronted by a startling truth, the Dutch eat fries with mayonnaise. The horror. We went to see the movie amidst the hype and were sitting in the back row of a full theater. At the moment that Travolta asks Samuel L. Jackson about what the Dutch put on their french fries, just in that breath between the question and answer, my wife, who is Belgian, says out loud, "Mayonnaise" a split second before Travolta. Needless to say, many heads turned. Now, everybody knows the answer, but in 1994, this was knowledge that only the initiated knew. Those were heady days. Holding the key to such knowledge was true power. To see the look on peoples' faces when it was revealed was truly a rush.

We had just moved to Texas from Belgium and everyone wanted to know the truth. Did they really eat fries with mayonnaise? Was this urban legend? Mere Pulp Fiction? Do they eat babies there? 

The answer always made people squirm and go into contortions. Yes, Virginia, they do eat fries with mayonnaise. But more important, they are not French Fries. If you want to ruffle a Belgian's feathers, call them French Fries. Get ready for a scolding. French Fries are Belgian! The name comes from the cooking technique of frenching, or slicing the potato, which the Belgians have taken to an art form. (In fact, there is a slicing method that uses hexagonal cuts to maximize the surface.) And they are quite proud of this art form and resent that the French get the credit. This goes for Jacques Brel and Agatha Christies's Hercule Poirot, both Belgian. Now, doesn't this make Robert Ney and Walter Jones look even more ridiculous for renaming them "Freedom Fries". Should we have also given the Statue of Liberty back? Oops, didn't think that one through, did we.

Back to the Belgian pride of fries, or more correctly, Frieten, or the diminutive frietjes, or the real Flemish fritten. A true Flemish pro, however, just drops the word all together and just says "eene kleine/grote met Mayo," refining the essence of the fries into the abstract. If you have not been to Belgium, you cannot really appreciate the cult status of fritten. It is not a simple food item, it is a statement and a philosophy, it is life. Which Frituur (where the golden manna is made and sold) you go to says a lot about you as a person. If you want to get a Belgian to talk, talk frietjes. You will have made a friend. If you say that you know that they are not French, you have a friend for life, one who will jump in front of tram for you.

If you have not been to a Frituur, let me describe the scene for you. They can either be walk-up and take away, or more luxurious and have a sit down area like a regular fast food restaurant, or a combination of both. This the case with the Frituur Number 1 in Antwerp. Quite possibly, this is the most famous Frituur in Belgium, and by extension, the world. It is a bit of a pilgrimage site for the Belgians. Whereas an American might have his picture taken in Washington D.C. at the Washington Monument or something, a Belgian would swell with pride beside Frituur Number 1. Forget the Manneke Pis, this is Beligum.

As you walk from the Cathedraal towards the Hoogstraat (High Street), you see it. At first you can't really believe it, "Am I dreaming?" you ask. It is true, you have arrived at Frituur Number 1, and your life will never be the same. Originally, it was a simple walk-up and take away format, but over the years, fame and fickle fortune has allowed them to expand on both sides. This is no laughing matter, selling frietjes. Frituur stands are making their way into NYC as well. Soon, they will take over the world. For now, Frituur Number 1 is king of Antwerp. There is always, and I mean always a line. It is a moving sight on cold, rainy Belgian nights to see the warm glow of Frituur Number 1 with people from around the world huddled under the tarp, eating Frietjes met Mayo and discussing the meaning of life. It is world peace incarnate. 

So, how do you order? That is the question at hand. At Frituur Number 1, you will always see a familiar face. The same four people, led by Maria, who gets mentioned by name in Belgian travel guides, have been there since the beginning. The Frituur Number 1 team, dressed in trademark, and truly inexplicable,  pink sweaters and striped aprons are ready to serve you, but you better be qucik. To them, you bark out your order over the din of the other patrons, much like selling stocks on the NYSE floor. If you don't move swiftly, you'll be tossed to the dogs. All is fair in love and war, and in ordering frietjes. Once you jockey up to the front, you will see what has been giving off such a welcoming glow.

All frituur joints have an altar in the form of a refrigerated display case, behind which the server reigns supreme. In the case is a mind-boggling array of items ready to be cast into the vat of boiling oil. Pieces of mystery meat, sausages, entire shish kabobs, hush puppy-looking things, chunks of cheese, if can you name it, it can be fried. Now, to all of you who think that this is odd, there is a trend in America now of deep frying Twinkies and even mac and cheese. Now, who's the one grossed out? Caveat emptor! If you order a "hamburger" you will get a surprise. Instead of a meat patty with a bun, it is a long meat tube of some mysterious origin. By the way, steak americain is raw chopped meat, often with a raw egg on top, in other words steak tartar. And, like in Italy, horse is on the menu. Back to the frietjes, though.

Behind the glass display and the servers, on large stainless steel counters you have the mountain of frietjes, ready to go. Frietjes are twice fried, so when you order from the heap of friets, they now go in for the second time. This results in a specific consistency. This consistency will make or break you. Belgians don't give second chances. It is a sad sight to see a neglected Frituur. If your Frituur fails, you should consider leaving the country in the cover of the night and changing your identity. You are persona non grata, a man without a country and no future. Frituur Number 1, however is the paradigm of success. So, the beckoning call of frietjes tempts you. You can order a kleine or grote. Small is not necessarily small, and the large, well, you better be hungry. There is a restaurant in Dallas, Texas called Snuffer's which has a basket of cheese fries and boasts a hefty caloric count of nearly 3,000. Belgians don't count calories with frietjes. That would be like asking to put a value on your first born child. 

As they place your order in the oil, which has to be checked by health officials quite often, and the oil can also make or break a frituur, you wait with anticipation. You must also decide what sauce you want. Think carefully, order with confidence. Obviously, the most popular is Mayo, but there are about 20-30 other sauces to choose from, including two of my favorite, Curry Ketchup and Americain (again, nothing that I have ever had in America, but a type of spicy 1,000 Island dressing). A note on the Mayonnaise as well is that it is not what most Americans know as Mayonnaise. It is yellow due to mustard, and has a different consistency than what is sold in the states. It is tangy and thicker.

Then, when the frietjes are done frying, you are served. They are lifted from the oil and scooped up into a stainless steel funnel to be dispensed. The most common way is to be put in a small paper dish, wrapped in paper, with two holes torn in the paper wrapping to let the steam out. The sauce is smothered on top. You then huddle (if you choose to eat outside, which I do) in the lean-to and enjoy with a small plastic fork. In Holland, they are more often served in a paper cone. Large, gaudy fiberglass anthropomorphic cones of frietjes are a common site. Frituur Number 1 wouldn't dare to have such crass advertisement. 

So, when does one eat frietjes? The answer, anytime. The first time in Antwerp, I lived on the Haarstraat, which is around the corner from Frituur Number 1, and it was always packed. Day and night. It is where everyone goes after hanging out at a cafe, for example. You go after dinner, you go for dinner. Anytime is the right time for frietjes. 

If you go to Belgium, and specifically Antwerp, then you have not officially visited until you go to Frituur Number 1. And, try the Mayo. Go ahead, you might be surprised.