Bucolic

I like good food arrosed with good wine, as well as good walking, and often try to combine both.

Today, I did just that. With some younger family members and their kids we visited the hamlet of Buitenland (meaning land outside the dyke, which is no longer true) on the Scheldt river, near Temse. Temse is a little town where the last bridge spans the river before it flows to Antwerp and to the North Sea. We had an outstandingly beautiful Autumn day with thousands of different colors in a bucolic landscape under a brilliant sun. (The picture was not taken today).

We had chosen a local "child friendly" eating place. It looked not especially clean, the service was too fast at first and then petered out to almost unexistant.
The hors d'oeuvre was tasteful. The (small) steaks tasted flat and the sauces were freshly made but very "drippy" and watery indeed. Second helpings of (overcooked) french fries came when everybody had finished eating but we finished them off anyway.
The bill was an unpleasant surprise - I am used to much better food and better service for that kind of 'investment'.
I'm not going to publish the name of the place : there are not that many restaurants in that "lost" but paradisiacal corner of Flanders.

But the walk on and along the dykes of the Scheldt was heavenly - I could have continued for miles and miles had it not been for my company.

There are some very beautiful houses in Buitenland ; apparently the people living there have some money. But there is the continuing threat of the Scheldt. The last great drama was about 50 years ago : in the night of January 31 to February 1 1953 there were multiple breaks in the dykes, and the whole region was flooded for a couple of months. Nothing like the dramas in the Netherlands at that moment in time; but bad enough anyway.

By the way, fifty years ago, each little place in Belgium had a series of pubs. Now the pubs are few and far between, and there has been an explosion of restaurants. If only each of those restaurants had one or two persons capable of cooking a decent meal, but unfortunately, that is not always the case. And the restaurants where you can get decent or gastronomical food are so taken in with themselves that one sometimes has the impression that serving clients is just as much as they can bear. And I have seen far worse - unimaginable rudeness to long standing customers.

Buitenland also means land beyond the borders, i.e. all foreign countries. So, when you go to Buitenland, you can claim that you have been abroad.

Buitenland : 9 out of 10.
Restaurant : 4 out of 10 (and I'm being magnanimous).