More Belgian waffle: Window shopping.

 The Belgians love their food, they really do.  And they love to put that love on display.

They take their cherries particularly seriously, this supermarket in Ostend had three different grades, at €5.50, €8.50 and €11.50 a kilo.  The €11.50 cherries were probably the best I’ve ever tasted.

 I first came across these small, flat, pale fleshed and utterly delicious peaches a couple of summers ago in Germany, since when they have started to appear more and more frequently over here too.  But what are they properly called?  I’ve seen them described as wild or flat, and on Ridley Road market yesterday they had whole bowls of slightly mouldy looking examples for a pound, labelled as doughnut peaches.  I tend towards Wild Peaches, but would advise against doing a google image search on the term to verify that, unless you want to see more of Peaches Geldof than I, for one, really need to…

 And obviously they love their fish,  even if, in Ostend, they do some pretty weird stuff to it. It’s the combination of fish and Belgium, I suppose – it was inevitable that things would get a little surreal…

There is a little colour distortion on this pic, but I swear, not much...

 In Antwerp, it got slightly less surreal:

The pics above were from a snazzy and expensive deli, specializing in cooked and cured fish, right in the tourist heart of Antwerp, while the fish in the pics below were on display in a neighbourhood fishmongers in the generally tatty district of Zurenborg, just South of the zoo, I think on Rolwagenstraat.  Those slices of squid in the middle pic are the biggest and meatiest I’ve ever seen, at a good inch thick, but the charming and very friendly proprietress assured me that they were very tender.  As well as the shop, she also ran a fish café, specializing in seafood tagines, a few doors down the street that was open only for lunch and only between 12 and 2.  It was one of the few great disappointments of our trip that we didn’t find ourselves in that neighbourhood in that time slot on either of our remaining days in the city.  It's called the Orangerie.  If I'm back in Antwerp any time, and I hope I will be, it'll be high on my list of places to visit.

 Generally in Belgium a lot of stuff comes in shades of beige, taupe, and mushroom.  It is, I think, a palette that reflects an undemonstrative, self effacing aspect to the national character.  When it comes to some things though, like the fish salads in Ostend above, or candy they really let themselves go wild...

To the point of making sweet shops look like they belong in the red light district…

And then there were the pastry shops.  Becca must have hated these, all that butter, eggs and cream.  Whipped cream in particular.  Slagroom, as the Flems have it...

And, of course, chocolate...