After almost five years in Belgium, I did something for the first time: I went to the beach.

I’m not sure what might be more surprising to many, that Belgium has beaches or that it took me five years to spend a day in the sun there. I cannot find any statistics about how many annual days of sunshine Belgium averages. Rather, experts say Belgium “might get 2 hours of sunshine in January, up to 8 hours in June”. I think all this tells you something.

So finally I tried out the beach at De Panne, close to Calais; in fact, (apparently) so near to the French border that several people I spoke to in French asked me “what brings you to France?” and most of the cars had French license plates. This made me feel sort of lost, as it is in Dutch-speaking Flanders, squarely in Belgium. Why would people keep saying we’re in France, when clearly we’re not? I thought. It tempted me towards mobthink. Like everyone around us knew something obvious that we did not, even when my intellect was certain.

Interestingly, even the beaches here reflect the social frictions. All the “rich” that spent their days by the sea were once the French-speakers. Thus, even though the beach towns are all technically Flemish, everyone used to speak French there. Now “all the rich people” are Flemish, so the tide has turned to service primarily in Dutch. That’s how some of the beaches (I suspect) get their reputations for being “snobby” or not – depending on one’s linguistic perspective. For what it’s worth, I found De Panne to still lean French, though being so close to France might moot all the local Belgian social factors.

Anyhow, we had a wonderful day, although it took 2.5 hours to get there (as long as it can possibly take to get anywhere in Belgium), and the beach was a tram ride from the station (the longest tram line in the world, actually). After lying in the sun, outed as foreigners by the fact that we lay only on towels amongst a sea of beach windscreens, we chatted and laughed. I enjoyed the fascinating dynamics of our group (1 American, 1 German of part Korean descent, 1 Lebanese, 1 Zimbabwean of part Indian descent and 1 South African of Indian descent – wow!). For example, I learned how to properly cook and eat locusts and that pregnant women in parts of Africa crave to eat a certain kind of “dirt” that ants use to make their houses on tree trunks, which (reportedly) “tastes like rain”; I also learned that Lebanon is much more mixed and segregated than I presumed and that the reason I have mistaken every Lebanese I ever met for having an French accent is because they do. Most of all, we enjoyed the distinctly summer feeling that comes with the stick of salt water dried on your skin, the smell of the sea, the coating of sand, the social correctness of eating lunch in a bikini.

Unfortunately we decided to leave at the same time as all Northern Europe. The tram took 20 minutes to inch forward 5 feet in traffic, so we put our flip-flops to the test of a 4 mile trek. We beat the tram (!) but missed the train by 4 minutes, which now put us home at 23:30. But I didn’t mind. I’m not a particular beach-lover, but the ritual of a cool shower and long night’s rest after a long day in the sun is one of life’s quiet luxuries. Definitely worth 5 year’s wait.