While Belgium is closeby and not too different culturally and linguistically (well, Flanders, anyway), there are some minor differences. Some involve keyboards (stupid AZERTY!), some involve slightly different meanings for certain words, and some involve food.
For instance, they like their chips. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but the area where my boyfriend lives has a pretty high density of chip shops. Generally the sort that rather smells like, well, an old-fashioned frietkot (I’m still suspicious about what they use for frying).
They also seem to be hugely distrustful of Dutch chips for no good reason, but whatever.

Proper home-made Belgian chips:

Made by my boyfriend’s grandmother, basic marinated tofu made by me.

Another thing that’s ever so slightly different is the bread. While it is a basic food just as much in the Netherlands as it is in Belgium, it seems to have even more of a significance there. I can’t quite describe it, and it may just be a difference between families rather than between countries, but still. Belgian bakeries have bread-vending machines. That’s different.

See:

Also, they are, again, somewhat distrustful of Dutch bread. I think it’s something to do with the way it keeps longer, probably due to the addition of certain additives.
The lack of (at least some) additives might explain why bakeries are open on Sundays as well. At least I think they are. I’m pretty sure we stopped by one on a Sunday once.

Not so much a difference, but a food that’s not commonly found here. Chervil soup.
No picture of that since I didn’t eat any this time, but occasionally my boyfriend’s mum makes a batch when I visit, and it’s absolutely lovely stuff.

Some more foodie things we did involved visiting a local vegetarian restaurant and stopping by Stonemanor for some Brit food.

Loot:

While I don’t actually like crisps, I tend to find a packet of Walkers salt and vinegar incredibly hard to resist. It’s really only because the stuff’s not available here at all outside of shops catering to expats and the occasional Britain-related festival.
At least I managed to not buy the Irn Bru.

I didn’t get as much as I’d expected and easily stayed within my self-imposed limit. It helped that TruFree seems to have done away with the puddings (they also changed the ingredients of their custard cream and bourbon biscuits so they now include milk. I had no intention of getting those, but still. Grrr) and there were no ingredient lists for the many frozen bagels they had.

Remember when I posted about how the Nutrition Data blog ignored animal foods when going on about greening one’s diet?
I don’t know if it’s the comments left to that post or if they were pretty clued in to begin with and simply didn’t think of it for their nice list, but a bunch of their Earth Day-related posts have been all about eating plants because it’s good for our darling planet.

There’s a post about going vegetarian for a day (which could use a mention of maybe trying the thing for life), followed by a post about vegetarian protein (because that’s so difficult to find in plants), which is secretly all about the awesomeness of beans, and I also got a nice email about how some eco-conscious people have gone totally vegetarian, but how just a few vegetarian days a week can already make a difference.

While they don’t come on nearly as strong as I would on the issue (not to mention the lack of other relevant angles) and I couldn’t help but get ever so slightly sarcastic at times, this whole thing is making me all happy.

At the same time, some other people are making me happy as well. Yesterday we actually had band practice, and, since my pipes were still in someone else’s car, I actually went. Though I managed to miss the bit where the Germany trip was evaluated, I got a short summary during which I was also told that, should we do something like this again, they would make it clear to the organisation that they had a member with an alternative diet.
While this is in no way a guarantee I will get me some decent vegan meals (which isn’t a problem. I like taking care of myself on this one. Besides, the omnis have no guarantee they’ll get them some decent meals, either) and won’t stop me from bringing along my own food, I thought it was most lovely of the people to actually think of my dietary oddness without any prompting from me.

Aren’t I up-with-omnis today?

I’m back!
And I had fun.

I didn’t get particularly close to Berlin, nor did I spot any falafel places. I didn’t sleep as much as I normally do, I didn’t manage to find any particularly humorous licence plates, and I could do without hearing the Radetzky March for a good while.
But I managed to have a very good time regardless.

I found something vegan among the catered stuff about half the time and actually had one of the catering people ask “vegan?” when I asked if something had milk in it in my best German, which made me exceedingly happy (though I was also most appreciative of the guy who bothered to ring someone about whether the mash had milk in it, even if he assumed food sensitivities rather than ethics), I met my quota of conga line-fun for the year, if not the decade, spent a lot of time in a car yet didn’t get carsick even once, got delightfully loopy due to lack of sleep and abundance of social time rather than abysmally grouchy, and had a ton of fun hanging out with people from all over and making music.

And while I spent most of the time indoors, either in hotels or in sports halls, I did manage to visit a supermarket for some extra food and got to see enough of the outside of Germany to aquire a strong desire to go back there for a nice holiday.
Preferably the sort that involves some nice hiking.

Conveniently, it turns out my German isn’t actually that dismal. My dad did say I’d pick it up easily.
The weird thing is, though, if I didn’t quite know how to say something in German, my brain quickly switched to French. A language in which I may have been fairly fluent some years ago, but with me not having anyone to talk to and losing TV5 and thereby the ability to watch French-Canadian news during breakfast and French krimis during the weekend, my fluency level has dropped dramatically. So it makes no sense whatsoever to switch to that.
Also, with me not coming across too many Germans who seemed to speak English well enough to try it on me (the Musikparade had an overwhelmingly geriatric audience), I doubt French would be much use.
My brain is delightfully strange at times.

The Spanish I knew was of little use in trying to communicate with the lovely (and remarkably polite for a bunch of teenagers) people from the Mexican band, but then my Spanish is limited to the most basic stuff picked up from U.S. television, and maybe a handful of insults. I also have some vague recollections regarding the correct pronunciation of “pollo” and remember correcting my dad on it il y a quelques années, with some embarrassment due to the meaning of the mispronounced version, but I forgot what you’re actually supposed to be talking about when you’re saying it wrong.
Probably penises or something.

There were a bunch of other bands, either more showy marching bands, or military marching bands. There was a Polish one, a Ukranian one (which mixed the military with the showy into something pretty damn cool), a Czech one, a German one, and another Dutch one. The public were told we were Scottish, which we aren’t technically, but no one seemed to care.

Though I took my camera, I forgot to take pictures most of the time. Besides, while there was some vegan food, it wasn’t all that spectacular overall, so apart from being very happy that, unlike the rest of the people, I had my own food to fall back on and wasn’t fully relying on the catering, I didn’t really bother taking any pictures of it.

I did, however, take some other random pictures, mostly not related to food.

Don’t feed the water birds.

Use condoms.

Bracelet I got from one of the Mexican kids. At least I got to use some of the Spanish I did know to properly thank them.

DNA car! This is about as funny as it got for me, licence plate-wise.

And for your entertainment, a minute’s worth of afternoon autobahn, showing you, among other things, that I don’t have very steady hands.

To make this seem at least vaguely like a vegan food blog, I’ll tell you that I very much loved the Berief Soja Fit Schoko +Kalzium and wish I could get my hands on it here.

~-*-~

While going through my stats from the last few days, I noticed someone found this site by searching for “picture of twigs as a meal”.
Cracked me up something good.

Last post before my little trip. I’ll be back next week, with more tasty vegan things and most likely a tl;dr report on the food situation during the trip.

Here a picture of the pre-packaged food I’ll take along to Germany:

Looking at it like this, it seems rather a lot…
And it’s not even the whole thing. There’s still some sammiches I’ll have to make, I have some small containers with soy nuts, raisins, and dried apricots, and I still have to fill that missing Heinz tomato juice-like bottle (not buying those again, ever. There’s still a lingering taste of tomato juice in spite of all the fruit juices added. Not my thing, tomato juice. Oh, and it’s pointless, overpriced and overpackaged food. Even less my thing) with Brinta so I can make me some runny porrige if I mix it with some rice- or soymilk in the missing Tropicana juice bottle.

Maybe some of my carrots look presentable enough to bring along…

Now lets see if I have some jim-jams lying around. Might be nice if I have to share a hotel room. I should also maybe prepare me some dinner before going on home to my parents. And do my dishes. *sigh* I’m terrible at planning trips. It’s a good thing I don’t have to plan the whole damn thing, really. We’d never get anywhere.

ETA: Found jim-jams. And all cool and retro ones, too. Got them from my Gran. One problem, though. The food doesn’t really fit. That kind of sucks. I guess I could chuck some in my clothes bag, but then I won’t be able to use that as a pillow. And I suspect I will want one…
Maybe I should use the meshy side pockets for drinks…

Not a what-I-ate-today post, but some questions about what-I’ll-eat-later.

Next week I’ll be going to Germany for a few days with the band I’m in, going along with another band we’re friendly with. We’ll be playing several tattoos in the Berlin-region (I think. Berlin isn’t actually on the list of places we’ll visit, but everyone keeps going on about the Berlin trip) and with the playing and the practicing, I kind of doubt I’ll be able to check out the local supermarkets for my food the way I do when we visit the UK for a few days.
Shame, really. I always love that bit about going elsewhere.

We’ll be staying in hotels, and some arrangements regarding food has been made as well. However, I have no way of knowing if there’s anything vegan available.

So. Questions.