2 Texans Down Under

Here we are in Belgium, and I forgot to mention chocolate. Yesterday I said a person cannot live on beer alone. I said you need cheese, too, which the Netherlands has in great varieties and impressive quality. But I forgot to mention chocolate.

Belgium is famous, of course, for its production of that cocoa-based product, and travelers shocked by exchange-rate inflated restaurant prices here and in the Netherlands (AU$35 for lunch, US$80 for dinner, per person, without wine?!) quickly learn to supplement their diets with chocolate as well as cheese.

Relative to restaurant meals, the luxurious brown, or sometimes white, stuff — said to have health benefits, to be a mood lifter, and even to be an aphrodisiac — is cheap here. You can, of course, pay high prices for it molded into various shapes including shells, small animals, and bare human breasts with prominent nipples. (Chocolate shop windows can be aphrodisiac.)

In Bruges’s tourist area, you can buy assorted chocolates elaborately gift-boxed in any one of 40 shops, but you can get the same good stuff in plain bars in grocery stores for much less. What a diet! So relatively frugal.

Fortunately, given our high-calorie intake, our main mode of getting around in the towns and cities here is walking hour after hour through the sight-laded streets. We’ve even rented bikes a couple of times.

Bicycles are everywhere and amazingly well provided for by the planners of infrastructure, especially in the Netherlands. We rode from a small town called Oss to a smaller town called Heesch on the country’s longest dedicated bike path. It’s marked with a symbol proclaiming bikes to be king.

Bike riders surely rule on Amsterdam’s downtown streets even when they have to share their red-pavement paths with slow-moving cars and pedestrian tourists who don’t yet know the rules. One can get rudely shouted at by straying into the red.

Belgium provides well for peddle-pushers, too, by Australian standards, which are, as we’ve noted before, many miles ahead of American standards.

Belgians, though, get around more by car than the Dutch, and city automobile traffic here is worse than anything we’ve seen in the Netherlands. There are some depressingly large vehicles on Brussels streets, including fat-bodied VWs and BMWs that I don’t recall seeing elsewhere.

Biking in Amsterdam itself, though, seemed risky to us because that big city’s riders, who commute to and from work daily, move with speed and evident abandon. We’ve seen no collisions so far, which leads to assume that the unskilled die young.

Kids, elderly people, and those in between whiz around day and night on bikes that often look ancient and rarely have more than three gears, which is enough in these flat countries.

Except for a few Speedo-clad bike club folk in the countryside, everybody we’ve seen rides sitting up straight here, not bent over on racing-style bikes like those most common in Australia. In this springtime, they tend to be warmly dressed and at rush hour many are in suits and ties or office-wear dresses.

Open-cart three-wheelers designed for deliveries and shopping are used by parents for ferrying small children around. Some have plastic domes to protect the little ones from rain and cold. By school age, though, every child has his or her own little bike, although mom or dad often rides along with them.

It seems likely that this emphasis on muscle-power for transportation accounts for the fact that there appears to be a much higher percentage of slender people here, young and old, than in either America or Australia.

More than in our home country or our new home country, the accepted, expected, and publicly-encouraged way for most people to get around is by bicycle. It’s a fine way of working off the effects of gastronomic delights such as cheese, chocolate, and beer.