Highlight #8: Death by Beer Bar in Hainaut.

This one is easy to explain.

The Walloon city of Tournai has a case for being Belgium's oldest. It's got plenty of sites to sight, like the eight-centuries-old Notre Dame cathedral, and a bustling Grand-Place with oodles of cafés.

As a beer town, though, it's sleepy. Most of those cafés are tied houses to various regional breweries offering little in the way of surprises. Among those, the Beffroi and Imperatrice are probably your best bets.

For its attractions and size Tournai ought to do better. There was a bar called Cave à Bière, but it closed and was still shut when I went last summer. (It appears to have been resurrected more recently as a less beery all-you-can-eat rib shack. Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

But we did have a tip, short on details: the Cornwall.

In certain Belgian bars there is an effortless overlap between metal, Celtic, Gothic and medieval. I'm thinking of the Porte Noire in Brussels as an example. Maybe you need to be non-European to understand what I mean by effortless in this context. For us, heavy metal was real but all the Iron Maiden-esque dungeon and torture imagery was really cool euro-fakery. Likewise, we are overly fascinated by castles. But when a European metal bar puts up some medieval weapons and torture implements, it is not only a fake heavy metal thing. There is some history there. Particularly in a place like Tournai.

Not to say the Cornwall is anything like a museum. My point is, its tongue-in-cheek evil is cool and breezy. Of course there are sickles and (fake) decapitated heads on display. Of course there is no actual list of the 150 or so beers. You need to go to the fridges and have a look yourself. Among them were De Ranke, Ellezellois, La Rulles and St. Bernardus. Unfortunately I stuck with the theme and went for a Gruut Inferno, which I think was named for its blazing flavor of alcohol. Followed it with an XX Bitter just to put the fire out.

The combination of death, darkness, youth and tattoos may frighten away the normals but we found it all very friendly. Narrow place though, with just a handful of tables. More action around the bar, and the party does seem to spill outside at times. The address is 14 Rue des Puits l'Eau, opening at 3 p.m. most days and 5 p.m. on Sundays.

The little beer-mat sign hanging under that fellow's neck says mauvais payeur. Deadbeat. In other words, he didn't pay his bill.

That's a highlight from a Belgian beer swing. Will I ever get to #1 at this rate? I have my doubts. Here's an explanation.