In the morning, having awakened unrefreshed due to the constant stream of cars with diesel engines puttering by our window all night, I was very happy to receive coffee with a pot of steamed milk that came with a breakfast of rolls. Since we had taken the high road the previous day, this time we were starting in the valley outside of the fortified walls and visiting some of the other sights ringing the city.

We took the street our hotel was on, which had quieted down from the night before, to the entry point to one of the parks. On a bridge overlooking the narrow Petrusse, there was parkland in one direction and a desolate concrete channel framed by high walls in the other. Since the map showed the headwaters of the Petrusse nearby, we decided to follow the concrete ditch up a ways to see if we could find it.

Aside from the fact that a concrete channel isn't a very vibrant habitat for life, it was obvious pretty quickly that there were some serious problems here. Even before the odor of untreated wastewater reached us, there was a clearly demarcated dead zone in which no aquatic life could be sustained and everything was grey. We continued up until we found the source, above which was a vibrant, scummy green. It was like the Streeter-Phelps model being demonstrated before me, in real time. If only one of my professors had been there! This pattern was repeated several times as we continued up. Once the Petrusse entered an inky black tunnel and we had gone far beyond the point on the map where the river was supposed to start, we turned around and headed downstream. Arriving at our starting point, we noticed a couple people occupying a fold-out couch under the bridge. The guy who was awake turned at the sound of our voice, clearly not expecting any other inhabitants at that hour of the day. Jack wondered whether he was going to put the bed away and arrange the cushions on the sofa after his companion woke up.

After passing under the bridge we entered the verdant parkland, and the bridges we had crossed the day before soared overhead. There was, inexplicably, a row of private homes and their vegetable gardens in an enclave within the park. There were various other access points that would take you up the hillside into town consisting of stairways cut into the rock. Most had overlooks for interesting vantage points halfway between the valley floor and the top of the walls. There were also a number of doors leading to tunnels in the rock. One such door had a small port in it at about eye level, and cool air was rushing out of it, cold enough to make the door itself sweat with condensation. I paused there for a bit, blasting my forehead and drying out my eyes. So nice.

Rounding another curve, we came across the recreational area, which included a mini-golf course occupied solely by adults who seemed to have brought special shoes and their own clubs with them, a miniature train track (sans train), a tiny church built into the cliffside, and an automatic toilet. Jack took advantage of the latter, and when he put his 50 cents in and the door shut behind him, I wasn't sure I would see him again. Fortunately he came out in one piece, but he said he wouldn't recommend it for the ladies.

Once the Petrusse flows into the much more natural-looking Alzette, one enters the Grund district of town, built into the valley. Another charming area, with buildings constructed just short of the river's walls so that you could sit at a cafe overlooking the river and see the neighbor's window box arrangement of red geraniums reflected in the water below. Did we do this? No, because at the only occupied table at that particular place there was a guy who was at the table next to us at the corner pub the evening before, and that's just too weird. We went to the Oscar Wilde and had the local lager and panini sandwiches with a side of fries with curry sauce, hot and delicious.

Afterwards we climbed up the hillside across from the old city to go visit some towers. At the top we discovered that they were inaccessible, and that the whole hilltop was occupied by a giant old folks' compound surrounded by a high wall. It looked like a great place to spend one's infirm years, and I might have considered it were I not already planning to retire to the Philippines.

We left that particular scenic hilltop and as we began descending back into the valley it began to rain chats et chiens. We took shelter on what appeared to be the back porch of one of the houses cut into the hillside. Luckily no one came out to shoo us away, although a cat seemed to be incredibly miffed that we had stolen his dry spot, and he retreated to a small evergreen across the way. After the rain let up and we started off again we found out that in addition to being a back porch, it was also the roof of the home below.

The area surrounding the main portion of the city is a bunch of natural promontories formed by the action of the rivers, and many of them are not connected to one another so you're forced to do a lot of hill climbing to get from one spot to another. We were interested in seeing 'les trois glands' (the three acorns), which was another defensive fortification up the hill that had the good fortune of a silly name, causing us to go there. The first and second points of entry up the hillside were dead ends, the latter one being the correct road but for some reason crossing the train tracks at grade, with no continuation on the other side, so there was a lot of confusion and back-tracking. The third route we tried also looked bad, as it ended in a dirt trail halfway up the hill, but we forged ahead. The trail seemed to be separated from where we wanted to go by a deep ravine, but we were now in a densely forested natural area, and it was nice in spite of its apparent wrongness. We ended at another road at the top of the hill, turned in the direction of the glands, followed some paper arrows posted on cyclone fencing and...ended up at the brand-new I.M. Pei modern art museum (MUDAM), which they had constructed right behind the glands.

Although somewhat disappointing in that we still hadn't gotten a glimpse of the glands themselves, we did go in the museum due primarily to the fact that we were there, it looked like a cool building, and they had the air conditioning going. There was very little art in it, although the pieces they had were all gigantic and took up like 2 to a room. Jack suspected that they had spent all of their budget on the building and didn't have anything left over for art. The two I found most interesting were one with hundreds of different-colored bottles cascading down from a skylight, and one in which someone had constructed an elaborate church interior with x-rays standing in for stained glass windows. We wandered around the whole thing in a short period of time, and consulted the map desperately to see if we had missed anything. There was, apparently, art in rooms that didn't seem to have any art, for example one in which there were 4 benches and the sound of trickling water, but I'm just a simpleton when it comes to art. After spotting the glands through the windows (the landscaping was still a work in progress and therefore the fortifications were inaccessible), we left.

We decided that after taking in the 'three glands' it would be appropriate to view the 'Bon Maladies' which were another set of old fortifications overlooking the valley below. We cut back through the woods, and after passing a tranquil looking picnic table that was next to some stone steps that lead into a sadly gated-off tunnel into the hill, we came to the spot. The Good Illnesses were completely abandoned and we marveled that we had such as spot to ourselves with a spectacular view of the valley below and the old city on the other side.

We passed back through the valley and deigned to enter the city proper to have a beer at the first bar we came across, called Cuba Libre. Our foray into the city ended in disappointment after determining that we had arrived minutes too late to get an ice cream at a place the guidebook recommended. So we retreated back into a more conventional park (benches, fountains and winding paths) that completed our circuit around the city.

We took a back route to our hotel, passing a hospital on the way. There were numerous patients and visitors hanging around outside, including one gentleman who sat on a stoop opposite, smoking with his IV drip. A few steps beyond we came across our dinner destination: a Tibetan restaurant.

We briefly stopped back at the hotel to rest up and discuss other possible evening options, but I was intrigued by the Tibetan place so that's where we ended up. I got the cheese with chili sauce dish, which would be more aptly named the cheese with cheese sauce dish. It was good, but a little over-taxing in the lactose department, and not at all spicy. All in all, a recommended cuisine--the appetizers and Jack's main dish were all delightful. The restaurant had some electrical issues, and the lights on the ceiling would periodically shut off, leaving us bathed in warm candlelight.

Having had a long day already, we then went back to the hotel to doze fitfully again. For some reason it never occurred to us to change rooms, although that probably would have been wise.