Ah! Belgium.

What a wonderful country. It manages to have big cities that feel provincial while providing all the things one can't find in a provincial town.

The first (and quite possibly the most important) of which is Beer.

They take their beer very seriously in Belgium, far more seriously than in Germany, I think; they think of it as the French think about wine or as the British think about...well, their sauces.

Ambrose Bierce, that incredibly witty American (yes, they do exist) contended that the sauce is

"The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven."

in his The Devil's Dictionary.

One wonders if he meant something like "béarnaise" or "mayonnaise" or rather something like "catsup" or "A1". Either way, it is another thing the Belgians do well. Sauces.

During our stay there, we quickly became the Grote Markt's chip stand's most reliable customers and, once our (mine, I should say) incredulity upon looking at the list of sauces we could have poured over our thin, crispy chips, diminished, one could say we became rather more civilized than we were when we arrived in the city of Bruges last week.