Chris Baldwin currently lives in Moscow.

Flanders is the northern part of Belgium. They speak a language there really similar to Dutch, which is similar to German, which itself, at least in terms of grammar, is pretty close to English.

I was in Deinze, where the cobbled-classic midweeker Gent-Wevelghem starts.

The race itself is a big, boisterous, Belgian affair, drawing everybody who raced the Tour of Flanders the Sunday previous and pretty much everybody headed south for Paris-Roubaix the Sunday hence. It almost always ends in a mass sprint, unlike the two classics, because it is nearly 100km shorter and has fewer sections of brutality.

Oscar Freire of Rabobank won.

Locals watched the big race start, then settled in to their noontime beers for the VIP criterium downtown. Start lists were handed out and among the names were Museeuw and Van Petegem.

And a bunch of local guys on flash bikes. The style of the race was kind of like a track Madison. The VIPs were paired off with the locals and would do a lap or two, then tag their partners who would fly around until they got tired.

It lasted 45 minutes.

On the list was a Belgian boxer who pedaled kind of like how you would expect a cyclist to punch.

Museeuw was unrecognizable in kit, and appeared to be sporting both a wig and 20 extra kilos.

That morning I ran into old friends in the Gent youth hostel and we wended our way into the Falstaff bar in downtown Deinze to watch a bike race in the only and best way I know how: With a bunch of daylight drunks in a smoky workingman’s watering hole, knocking back 1.50 euro biertjes.

Marko and Mario took us under their wings.

Jo, my English friend and the fiancee of Patrick, my Aussie mate from the Crystal Palace races last year in London, asked Mario, here seen on the right holding his digital camera, what happened in the Tour of Flanders.

“I was wanting for the Boonen to make the win,” he said.

Why?

“Because Boonen was action!” Mario said, holding out pictures taken that morning of his cycling heroes, including Staff Schierlinckx, Wouter Weylandt, Robbie McEwen (“He speak the Flanders good!”) and Sunday’s winner Stijn Devolder.

But Devolder won, Patrick said, causing Mario to grimace a bit. What happened?

“Devolder was more action,” Mario said, shrugging and smiling and finishing what looked to be his seventh beer.

It was 3 pm.

A shaven-headed thug missing most of the big teeth in his upper-right jaw (the teeth most susceptible to, say, a left-hook) found out I was American and began to ask me about why Salt Lake City was so fucked up.

“I was there with the boys and we couldn’t find jack-shit in the bars to drink. We finally said fuck it and they drove out to Sturgis and I went back to Frisco.”

I deployed the neutral-engagement skills I learned at conflict-management camp and began to confuse him with hand-signals, using two outstretched palms held with their backs to him to indicate the United States. The first two fingers on my left hand I crabbed a bit to show where Montana was.

“No, I never been there. But the boys drove through Wyoming to South Dakota. Yeah,” he said, losing interest in potentially kicking my ass. Then he fumbled for his mobile phone, said something to Marko and Mario, and left.

Marko harrumphed into his beer, maybe his ninth, and muttered to Patrick.

“There is a woman in trouble now.”

What?

“He gets a picture on his GSM,” the odd phrase the Belgians and the Dutch use to mean mobile phone.

“It’s a woman in the town. She have two kids already from the different men. She show a picture on the SMS of her, what, her, down there place, for the womens,” he said, glancing at Jo sheepishly, who was at the other end of the bar watching the second lap up the Kemmelberg and pretending not to listen.

Mario stepped in, loud.

“Her poooosy. She show a picture of her poooosy to him, say ‘Come and get it if you want it’, so he have to go.”

Marko looked at me and Patrick. Patrick winced. Jo exuded obliviousness.

“There is a woman in trouble now,” Marko said again.

Quiet descended. A warmth, a breeze down the Deinze canal, sunshine on the banks, an afternoon of bike racing done, us back to to Gent for Algerian tagines away from the tourist center. The cobbles shook loose my fenders and a bolt from the rear luggage rack.

Two shots of Ouzo, or maybe it was Sambuca. Could have been Arak, the sweet anise-flavored liquor served with great flaming ceremony after a stewed plate of lamb and olives, followed by the sweet mint tee of the Arab world

Jo and Patrick and I shambled down the avenue and back to the Hostel de Draeche to sleep off a northern European Wednesday.