The best thing about Luxembourg...

is to say that you were in Luxembourg. Honestly, not that interesting. Perhaps parts of the countryside are beautiful, but Luxembourg City is not that...happening. I arrived and tried to get a ticket out for the next morning to go to Paris, but each train only has a certain number of tickets available to Eurail passengers, which turns out to be very few on some trains. She could only get me on a 5PM train. I haven't had a problem before this, so I suppose I am very lucky, and fortunate to be getting out the same day anyway...but it was about 7 hours too long.

Got to the hostel which is a very new building located in the valley (ok walking down with your bags, but try walking up!), and dealt with some of the most stuck up people I had met on my trip so far. And this was the case with the ticket lady and the tourist information lady as well. Perhaps the Luxians want to be the Parisians, so they adopt the same pretentious air and pretend only to speak and understand French, or Luxembourgish (no joke); however, Parisians have a reason to be that way because their city is great. Luxembourg, not so much...get over yourselves. This is probably a gross generalization, so I apologize to Luxembourg for that small rant. But along the same lines...Luxembourg is 2007's European Center of Culture. Wow, the EU must be really running out of countries...

OK, enough of the rant and more about what Luxembourg City is actually like. The "thing" about Luxembourg is that it was a fortified stronghold for anyone who conquered it, the French, the Spanish, etc. Each ruling power kept building up the casements, so much so that the city expanded all the way to the valley into the cliffsides with underground tunnels and rooms to house thousands of soldiers for weeks with kitchens and storerooms, etc. It would be a great defensive location. During WWI, when Luxembourg declared neutrality, they tore most of the casements down so whatever power took it over wouldn't be able to use the city as a stronghold. A few casements still exist, and I was able to visit the Bock Casements near my hostel. It is neat to walk through the tunnels in the cliff, and perhaps in a larger group I would have had more fun because it isn't so impressive, necessarily, to see. Then I walked all over town, which I am going to call sterile architecture. Everything is beige, stucco, and plain, especially the government buildings (which are all in one tiny, TINY square). The big cathedral is nice, but sterile as well. The most decorated building is the Ducal Palace...and the people LOVE their Grand Duke. Pictures of the Ducal family are everywhere! Decided to just walk around the edge of town where the fortifications used to be and just overlook the valley, which is lovely. On the other edge of town is a series of parks that lead up to some very ugly (very ugly) UN buildings, which I didn't make it up to. Headed back for an early night (and some laundry) and met some great people at the hostel! (Characters: Emilie from Guernsey Island, ten points to anyone who knows where that is!, who is studying at Cambridge and has an internship in Lux for the summer and Jeremy from the US who is also travelling around Europe) We talked all through dinner and into the night about everything from education to international politics to the Tour de France (which I hope I don't hit when I am in Paris) to linguistics (they are both into linguistics!) Jeremy suggested the Luxembourg City Museum...perhaps a good thing for tomorrow to figure out what this town was all about and how it got to be what it is.

Headed to that museum in the morning, and to tell you the truth, it was very insightful. Interesting story about why the city was built there about a king and his mermaid wife. He married this woman he met in the forest, but she asked him that one night a week or month, she would be left completely alone. He got jealous and spied on her one of these days and she was sitting in the bath with a mermaid tail. He was so shocked, he made a noise (as all these tales go) and she disappeared into thin air. He never found her, but he built a city right there in case she came back. Then the museum explained the different expansions and fortifications of the city and the current state of politics, culture, and city works. Perhaps a trip into the Lux countryside would have been nice, but one must move on. And I to Paris!