<long boring frequent-flyer-mile-oriented story deleted> so I was the first of our group to arrive in Belgium. I figured I’d walk around, have some beers, enjoy the silence.
I’d planned on declaring “vacation” and “birthday week” and whatever other justification necessary to start drinking beer at Old Belgian Guys Are Drinking Beer O’Clock (which is like 10am at the latest). However, I couldn’t bring myself to enter a bar today until well into the afternoon.
Not everyone here knows me so let’s lay it out:
- I normally have no problem with walking into a bar by myself (or seeing a movie by myself or whatever)
- I normally laugh off the awkwardness and difficulties inherent in trying to communicate with someone with whom you share little or no language
- Normally the disorientation of travel is all part of the fun
I don’t know why I wasn’t feeling it on Saturday. I didn’t actually enjoy myself until the third bar (and not because I was tipsy — it was hours and hours after the second bar). Part of it was that Bar #3 had an actual bar, which is far less weird for a solo drinker than pulling up to a table by yourself. It also increases the chances that someone will strike up a conversation with you, which someone did. But most of today’s problem was in my own headspace. Man, French is hard, foreign countries are hard, picking a beer is hard!
WAH WAH FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS. For goodness sake, I used to work at a Belgian-heavy beer bar, I even knew most of the beers on the menus.
Then it occurred to me that how I experience solo bar-going on a bad travel day must feel similar to the intimidation some people feel at a specialty beer bar. Maybe it was good for me to walk around all day feeling the full force of my social awkwardness and functional illiteracy in both French and Flemish. This is how some of my customers feel when they walk into one of my workplaces and look at the beer list.
What I’m saying is, I’ll try to remember today next time a customer gets flustered and blurts out something like “I don’t know! A pale ale or a hef or whatever! Just pick me something! I’ll drink it!”
In other, better news, I am in love with Moeder Lambic. More on them later.
Try to remember that the next time someone says “I like lagers and stouts, but not ale.”