Seef bier (pronounced ‘safe’) was a popular style of beer in and around the Belgian city of Antwerp prior to the outbreak of World War One. It was known as ‘the Champagne of the poor people’ yet its production died out and for many years the recipe was lost.
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The site of De Vleermuis had long been utilised as a carpark. During the installation of the fountain, which recycles water, 50 human skeletons were unearthed. Archaeologists have dated them to the Middle Ages and have concluded the location was previously a cemetery. Further excavations of the site are planned.
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One of my favourite dishes on the menu is Soljanka, a soup with Russian origins. Friends tell me that occupying Soviet troops introduced the soup to eastern Germany. To most residents of Saxony it proved more palatable than the presence of a foreign military power. Soljanka has remained popular following German reunification.
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Members of bobsleigh teams in the Winter Olympics tend to be muscular sprinters who push their sled then jump aboard once it’s moving. We, by contrast, get comfy before being given a helping hand by the man who just explained we must keep our hands inside of the soft bob as we travel along the track.
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Scheveningen is one of the locations across the Netherlands that mark the onset of the new herring season, each June, with celebratory feasts. Known as flag day — Vlaggetjesdag in Dutch — it sees people donning traditional attire while the country’s red, white and blue horizontal tricolour flaps from flagpoles and pokes in miniature from wooden cocktail sticks stuck into succulent slices of herring.
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Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Sydney has its opera house and, of course, New York has the Statue of Liberty. In our age of social media and punchy, image-led digital communications icons have become more important than ever. The opening of Hamburg’s new waterfront landmark, the Elbphilharmonie, led to an inevitable flurry of activity on Instagram, Twitter and blogs in northern Germany and beyond.
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The ladies of Amersfoort saved the city with beer...The ladies, who did most of the brewing in those days, decided to empty kettles with boiling hot beer from the city gates onto the ice. The result? The ice melted, the catapult sank, the army drowned. Hurray for our women!
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"Through projections on, in and outside the cube, with historic fragments and sound bites of New York in the 1940s, visitors are given a view inside the artist’s head," says Paul Baltus, the director of the Mondriaanhuis.
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It's a bright January day and icy wind whips across the hill topped by the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in northern France. I crouch by the monument to zip up my coat. A century ago hot shrapnel rather than cold air was ripping across this ridge overlooking the Douai Plain.
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I learn that appreciating good chocolate should involve all of our senses. Even the sound of the snap is important. She lets me sniff organic cocoa beans, whose aroma is far more powerful than those which have been cultivated.
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