Waffle House

Four days into my new job and almost back from the first assignment, in one of the darker recesses of Charles de Gaulle, almost ready to board the plane that would take me to Zurich, I was wondering how best to keep memories of the travels (or possibly travails) that will pile up hard and fast this year.  Trinkets were the first thing to come to mind, something local but useless, entirely uncreative and prone to accumulation and dust collection.  Not a good idea.  Better would be something marginally less useless, T-shirts for example, but what UGA in Athens, Georgia, where I spent the past two days, offered, didn't pass my taste test.

I could keep the stubs of the embarkation cards.  I used to do that way back when they were still made of heavy paper, handed to you upon check-in.  Now they're displayed on smart phones.  Not a good souvenir either.  There were a few other options, but I rejected them all.  Instead,  I'll write a little something, pointless but subjective, about all the places I'll visit for work.  I'll label the category out of office.

If there's one thing that encapsulates Georgia, from the narrow perspective through the window of the airport shuttle, an hour and a half of darkness on the way to Athens and a bit more than that on a foggy day back to the airport, it's Waffle House.  Waffle House is Georgia.

You might argue it's peaches.  That's what the state marketing department tries to communicate, but the only peaches I saw were syrupy halves scooped from a tin, served during one of the coffee breaks of the workshop I attended.  They didn't make an impact among the chunks of pineapple and mango.  Waffle House, in contrast, stood out.

Waffle House was everywhere, at every freeway exit and at every highway intersection.  There were a few scattered about the suburbs of Athens as well.  I half expected to see them on license plates, glorified as if they were Idaho potatoes, but there it was peaches.  Everywhere else, it was Waffle House, and everywhere it looked the same, rather elegant in a minimalist-modernist way.

The restaurants were all based on elongated rectangular footprints, built from brick without embellishment but with a panoramic glass front pulled around one of the corners.  Inside one could see hanging from the ceiling a long line of regularly spaced spheres that cast a light like lemon yogurt.  Against the back wall was the kitchen.  The diners sat by the window, a bit like Hopper's Night Hawks but without the curves.

What exactly Waffle House is I didn't bother to find out.  My guess is fast-food franchise.  This was America, after all.  On the other hand, it's rather un-American to understate your assets in the bright world of neon advertisement, and I doubt the House sells only waffles.  That, by the way, would also be un-American.  Waffles are Belgian, or at least the thing the Belgians are most mocked for.  Georgia seems to be a confused state.

Maybe I just misunderstood it, because there was some consistency:  The Belgian theme continued at the bar.  The local Terrapin Brewery made available a few fruity ales that were better left alone and a concoction that even the bartender could only describe as interesting, the ominous inflection in his voice indicating that this was no regular beer.

I have dramatically changed my attitude towards beer over the last year.  Before I went to Brugge in June, I drank only Pilsener, the bitterer the better.  Then I was faced with the madness the Belgians put into bottles (and then pour into a thousand distinct glasses), and redefined my world.  What I wouldn't call beer came in a wealth of flavors that it would have been a shame not to explore.  In Brugge, I discovered Achel, had my first proper Lambic, a geuze that tasted like sparkling citric acid, and an Ingelmunster Kasteel Donker that weighed in at 11%.

In the bar in Athens, memories of Brugge coming back to me, I choose the "interesting" Liquid Bliss two nights in a row, a black beer that tasted strongly of dark chocolate and peanut butter.  It was rich as a meal and not to everyone's liking.  Sitting with me, another German, his taste buds more traditionally attuned, drank it only reluctantly.  I put my feet up next to the fire and marveled at the weirdness of the world.