One of the first casualties of the Covid pandemic for me was my 2020 family reunion. I’m a part of a large and well-organized family known as the Bary-Barry Family (Famille Bary-Barry if you’re nasty) and 2020 was to be our thousand-year reunion. We are able to trace our common lineage back to someone named Odon (or Othon, or Odo) Bary who was born in the town of Bary in 1020. Every three years since the early 1980s, my family has gathered in a meaningful location for a 4-day reunion that is one part party, one part group vacation and one part history lesson. There have been about a dozen reunions so far and, thanks in large part to my parents, I have been to most of them.
The last pre-Covid reunion was in Oudshourn South Africa, hosted by my South African relatives, which far outnumber any other nationality in our family. Our reunions are like the Olympics, where a certain contingent of the family elects to “host” the following reunion each time. At the end of the 2016 reunion it was decided that we would break our every-three-year tradition and hold off until May 2020 so that we could have a true millennial reunion in the Belgian town that carries our namesake, Barry.
Barry Belgium is no longer a legal entity. It is now a neighborhood of the French Belgian city of Tournai, which is known for a haphazard Roman/Gothic cathedral and a massive quarry. In the years leading up to the reunion, the relative who volunteered to host the reunion, Basile, had been diligently communicating with us about the various plans and costs of the reunion. Michael and I had booked our flights (JFK->Brussels) and hotels well in advance and eagerly awaited our first international trip since 2016.
Well, obviously that didn’t happen. We instead spent a good amount of time communicating with Delta and our hotels to get refunds (everyone was very nice about it) and the family decided that we would hold off until 2021, and then 2022, and then, ultimately 2023. When it came time to re-book everything, our whims had shifted so we decided to bookend the Belgium trip with a few days in Amsterdam, a city I had never been to but Michael had dated an Amsterdamer (is that what they’re called??) so he had a bit of familiarity with the city and since we’d need to take a train to Ghent regardless, it seemed like a better option than Brussels, which looks nice but honestly a bit boring (sorry, it’s just what people tell me.)
The flight was a red eye but we arrived in Amsterdam pretty bright and bushy tailed, all things considered. The train from Schipol to downtown Amsterdam is amazing and puts the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s Rube Goldberg of an “Air Train” to absolute shame. We had a few hours to kill before our room was ready so we dropped our bags and wandered around. Those of you know me even just a little will not be surprised at all to hear that my first stop was a pharmacy to buy so much European skincare that the cashier asked me “do you want ALL of this?” (The Dutch are very direct). My second stop was a head shop to buy psylocibin “truffles,” which are legal through some loophole which is too arcane to go into here.
We thought it would be nice to microdose and take a canal cruise, so once we got back to our hotel I looked up the dosage on the shrooms I bought and decided to take a little more than half of what the literature claimed was a “mild” amount. Well, reader, it was not mild. I took about half of what I had portioned out before the open-eyed visuals kicked in and I was legitimately tripping. I told Michael to stop eating and headed out for an uneasy walk to the canal cruise. By the time I sat down on the boat I was honestly fine and it made for a wonderful little cruise experience, even though I definitely was not planning on tripping on mushrooms (semi) by accident on my first day of my first international vacation in seven years.
Oh well.
semi-on shrooms and fully on a canal
The rest of our time in Amsterdam was spent thrift store clothes shopping (It’s amazing there), eating my first official Lomo Saltado, and having dinner with Michael’s ex and his (very fuckable) husband.
The train to Ghent took about 3 hours from Amsterdam and it might as well been a different planet. In Amsterdam everyone was tall, chic-ly dressed, 99.98% white and everyone spoke English everywhere, also the food was pretty mid, except for the Lomo Saltado, which was fantastic.
In Ghent everyone spoke Flemish and literally zero signs had English or French or German or any other language from a neighboring country, there was a bit more diversity of people (it’s still Europe though) and the food was markedly better. We got a little lost on the tram from the train station to the hotel because Flemish is kinda close to German and I took three years of German in high school and hoped for the best.
The first event of the reunion was a welcome reception on Thursday night at a theater in downtown Ghent that also apparently does cocktail parties. This was the first time seeing a lot of my relatives in seven if not ten-plus years so it was really special. During the night, one of my relatives, Eric, who organized the 2010 reunion in Versailles where we got to tour Madame Du Barry’s private apartment, came up to me and….let’s say strongly suggested that I should host the next reunion in New York City in 2026. More on that later.
The rhythm of every reunion I’ve ever been to has been that the Thursday night event is pretty light and then there is a full day Friday, and Saturday is the Big Day, which has been interpreted various ways over the decades. Friday morning’s activity was a gentle boat tour of Ghent conducted by a guy who looked like the child of Lee Pace and John Lennon.
The boat tour was followed by a lunch at a brewery where Michael and I had an extensive conversation with one of my French cousins who is a self-employed massage therapist about worker solidarity in the context of the strikes happening in France over the retirement age. I think we hold up France as this worker rights utopia (which it is) but it is not without issues; it seems that a lot of the protections for workers do not extend to freelancers and small business owners. There does not seem to be this fetish for individualism that we have here that values entrepreneurship since a lot of worker protections do not extend to the self-employed. America is still very bad though.
Another thing that I picked up on is that the nobiliary particle, (ie. when you see a “de” or “von” etc. before someone’s surname) is sort of seen as a bad thing in France and kids are actually bullied for it, which makes sense considering their history. My cousin noticed it when she took her husband’s name after marriage and noticed a change in the tenor of certain interactions.
Fun fact about Ghent is that coffee shops open at 9 am, which is insane to me. One morning I went down to the front desk of our hotel at around 6:45 and asked where I could get coffee and they seemed legitimately stumped—as if no one had ever asked this question before. I had to beg the staff of the restaurant to brew me a pot of coffee and it turns out that the restaurant is a pretty legit cocktail bar by night and they had a copy of Brad Parson’s AMARO, in which I have one picture and two recipes and while the coffee was brewing I pulled up the page with my picture and said “hey this is me” which is something I never do but I thought it would be nice to know that the person making the coffee was helping out a fellow hospitality worker. I also tipped her ten euros so relax.
Another fun fact about Belgium and Holland is that cash is basically illegal. I pulled out 100 euros at the beginning of the trip for like tips or whatever and I legitimately struggled to use it. I have never seen so many “No cash” signs in my life. Complete opposite of here where you can get a 4.9873% discount if you use cash lol.
Back to the reunion. The big day was Saturday and we all piled into a tour bus to drive to Barry, Belgium. There were about 80 of us this time which is actually a pretty low turnout for one of these reunions. I’ve been to ones in South Africa that have had hundreds.
Barry is no longer a legal entity and has been absorbed by Tournai. Tournai is also in the French-speaking part of Belgium and it’s basically France. I didn’t see a lick of Flemish anywhere. Wild. We were met by the Deputy Mayor of Tournai (the actual Mayor was pulled away on urgent Tournai-related business, apparently.) and they unveiled a plaque commemorating the thousand-year anniversary of the family that looked like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This was the second time the family had “officially” visited Barry, the first time was in 1983 and the man who organized that reunion, who I don’t think was actually related to us, presented some materials from that reunion including photos (my parents were there) and related correspondence. There was also a photo of the 1986 reunion which was in Bayeux—my first.
Oh, there were also news crews there and I was interviewed twice but I don’t think I made it to any actual broadcast. We then toured an elementary school where we were confronted with what looked like months of work on the part of these kids (their teachers) to present a history of the town. Odon Barry was born in the town and was one of William the Conqueror’s knights during the invasion of Wales and was actually given a castle, Manorbier,where we toured during our 2001 reunion that my dad planned (it was a great reunion) . The town was also under Nazi occupation and the liberation of the town and release of POWs in 1944 is celebrated on September 3.
I will never get over the fact that I can trace my family history back a thousand years. Since I grew up going to these reunions it just seemed totally normal to me. And, well, it’s very not normal. I don’t know anyone else who’s family comes even close. We have a coat of arms and a family slogan (“Boutez en Avant” which means push ahead in French.)
I can’t find it now but there is a full family tree where I can go from me, all the way back to Odon, which is insane and the most aristocratic shit I can imagine.
The final night of the reunion is the “gala” which is technically black tie but there is no way in hell I was schlepping a fucking tux to Belgium to wear for 5 hours. So, we did our own thing and one of my French cousins lamented that it must be nice to not have to worry about what your parents though about how you dressed and, yeah when you’re 40 it’s fairly easy to disregard any parental disapproval, of which I don’t think there is any for me.
This is what is known as “Belgian Black Tie”
During the gala I sat next to one of my German cousins, who I’m actually fairly closely related to; we are both members of the Second Bavarian Branch of the family. My great grandfather was Wilhelm von Bary and he was kicked out of Germany by the Kaiser and changed the nobiliary particle from “von” to “de.” There are French branches, Argentine branches (they left Germany long before WWII just for the record) and the South African branch which is actually made of up thousands of Barrys who were descendant from a bunch of siblings who came down from England in the 1800s. There is also a very cool British Barry, James Barry, who performed the first C-Section in South Africa and we would probably call him a trans man today. Happy Pride!)
In many respects, the most important event of each reunion is the Family Council where the location of the next reunion is decided—like the Olympics. Because my French cousin Eric pitched me as the host for the 2026 reunion in NYC, this was my first official council meeting, and I had a vote. The discussion centered around bringing new people ie. the younger generation into the fold. When NYC was brought up as the location of the next reunion, there were some concerns about affordability but those were quieted by the appeal of NYC as a way to bring in more people due to its status as a global metropolis. Plus, there are tons of family members in the States that have not really been able to go to reunions, which except for one in DeBary, Florida (yes) have all been in far flung locations like Germany, Argentina, France, and South Africa. So NYC won the vote and I (along with Michael and a few other helpful American cousins) will be planning the next reunion in May of 2026. If you know any fun things that 100+ people can do together in NYC, please send recommendations my way.
Wow, congratulations to all four of you for reading until the end. Thank you!
Here’s some stuff I did since my last newsletter:
I’m a Bartender and Yes, I Use Gatorade in Cocktails
A Pizza-Flavored Cocktail? Hear Me Out
'Drag Is Freedom': Texas-Born NYC Drag Queen Julie J on Fighting Anti-Trans Hate in the South
Recipe Club Season 3: BBQ Sauce
And if you’re planning to go to Bar Convent Brooklyn this year, I have a 25% off discount code because I’m on the education committee and I’ll be there all day on the 13th! Say Hi!
And also if you’re a spirits brand (or non-alc, CBD, THC, etc.) I am a judge on the LA Spirits awards the deadline to enter is Monday. Do it!!!!