American in Spain

I began my thirty-fourth birthday with a pretty severe hangover from the night before. It’s been years since I’ve had such a throbbing head in the morning, especially from such a small amount of beer (two liters over six hours), so I suspect it was more about not having a bottle of water beside my bed like I normally do to stay hydrated at night. Anyway, it was a bit of a slow morning. Brian and I had made tentative plans the night before to maybe go visit the town of Bruges, a little more than an hour away. I was delighted when he showed up with his whole family, his wife, Cloe, and two sons, Aiden and Milo, ages 4 and 0.5 respectively.
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Tired and hungry from my multi-kilometer tourism trekking, it was time to taste some typical Belgian food and, more importantly, some Belgian beers. My hosts, Simon and Paola, chose La Villette, a small, warm restaurant boasting Belgian Cuisine. Simon and I took the metro into the city and stopped off for a pre-dinner beer at a dark, cozy pub. It was down a small alley that had actually caught my eye earlier in the day. It was a narrow, dank, stone alley off of a main pedestrian street that led, after six meters, to two doorways: one led, jarringly, into a bright florescent lit shopping mall, and the other to a dark pub.
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This past weekend my town, Colindres, celebrated its Second Annual Beer Festival. We went only one day last year, but this year we went all four days. I had a total of 3.5 liters of beer in seven half-liter (±1 pint) mugs. They also had liter steins, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy one. Plus, I subscribe to the “smaller servings is better” beer philosophy of my adopted country.
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Ice cold beer cans glistening with condensation…what better way to celebrate Holland and Spain making it to the finals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. One of them will win their first ever World Cup. Who will it be? I don’t know, but I’m going to be drinking some ice cold lager and enjoying every minute of the game.
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For a week now I’ve been seeing signs around town advertising the “I Festival de Cerveza de Colindres“, but none of the signs said exactly what or where it was, just the dates, June 17 – 20 and the bars that were sponsoring the event. I sort of assumed that it was going to be some discount on beers in those bars or something, but yesterday we ran into a friend that informed us that it was a big festival with bands in a tent near the town hall. Unfortunately, it has been cold and rainy all week, but today, on the last day of the festival, we went to check it out. This is what we found…
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