Thursday we went to Rick’s American Café with the other students after class. We all got to relax and didn’t have to attempt to speak to each other in broken French. The Irish woman revealed that she never had a Guinness until she became an adult, since that was the beer kids associate with fathers skipping church to go to the pub and other bad habits. She also said that it was what the monks would drink during Lent when they were “fasting”. Personally, I think that’s bending the rules a bit too far, what with all the calories in a pint. Plus having Guinness on an empty stomach will probably make you tipsy pretty quick, and not given to thoughts of godliness. For her benefit, we four Americans (and in particular the three Ohioans) tried not to spend too much time reminiscing about the Old Country, but I’m not sure how successful we were. On the way home we saw four prostitutes loitering on the main thoroughfare. I was surprised I hadn't seen any before, but we aren't usually in that area at that time of the evening. I looked forward to the confusion on my teacher's face when I told her "Je vois quatre femmes de la nuit".

Friday it was off to sunny Luxembourg City, in the heart of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg! We got the train schedule on-line and got to the station within 10 minutes of departure of our chosen train and…we couldn’t use the automatic ticket machine for international service. We had to wait in line to speak to an actual person, although the end result was the same: told the dude what we wanted and he gave it to us. He didn’t ask us for ID or anything. So then we had to wait an hour for the next train, which wasn’t so bad since it allowed us to stock up on reading material and water.

The train was about 1/2 full after it passed through the 5 Brussels stations. One guy, apparently knowing that they wouldn’t check tickets until we left the city, was hustling for money, and exited before we got out of town. As soon as we were out of the capital region and into Wallonia, they dropped the Dutch translation when making announcements. Many of the travelers were members of children’s groups of various ages that were going off on adventures, the young ones singing and shouting camp anthems to pass the time while the older ones practiced being nonchalant in close proximity to the opposite sex. There was a group of teens that was forced to occupy a train car’s entryway as they were tethered together by a length red and white plastic chain. At first they were pretty adamant about keeping the chain on, so they all had to crouch near the floor each time someone wanted pass over it. Later I noticed that one young woman kept slipping out of her bracelet so she wouldn’t have to change position to accommodate passers by. Lazy cuss.

The countryside was scenic, with fields of crops and rolling foothills thick with trees, interspersed with the occasional picturesque little town. One passenger kept distracting me from my window gazing by periodically getting out of her seat and begging for food. The first ones she hit up were a family of Italians who offered her a Capri Sun-type drink. She accepted it, went back to her seat behind them, and then couldn’t figure out how to open it. She had to enlist the assistance of the guy across from her. A few minutes later she got up again and asked the chained-together kids for something without success. She sat back down. A few minutes later she came up to us. I had three apricots in a plastic bag on the seat between us so I offered her one, she accepted, she went and sat back down. A few minutes later she got up again and approached us a second time! I told her we needed the last two apricots for ourselves. She sat back down. A few minutes later she went to beg from someone else and returned empty-handed. She sat back down. A few minutes later…it went on like this until she finally exited the train near the Belgian border.

Once the last stop in Belgium had passed, the conductor came around to ensure that we had all planned on going on to Luxembourg (I think that’s what he was asking at any rate). Then the train crossed the border, and after a time we rolled into a gritty industrial area (including a warehouse for a company called Maryland, specializing in tobacco products), and we were there. I didn’t even have a chance to pack my bag and rushed off the train with several items flapping about me so I wouldn’t accidentally get stuck riding back.

The hotel was near the train station so we went there to check in first. We stayed at the Italia, which had been recommended by the guidebooks as a cheap and interesting place to stay, as it had once been a private apartment building. The restaurant was also supposed to be good. Our room had two single beds and faced the street. An accordion door led to the small bath, although they managed to fit a bidet in there in spite of the size. It was pretty airless in the room, which did not bode well for sleeping given the temperatures in the upper 80s.

Armed with a handful of brochures from the front desk, we made our way into the center of the city. No one really ever has much to say about Luxembourg aside from comments on its size (and occasional cracks at its title as a “Grand Duchy”). The capital is pretty tiny as well, but it really is somewhat attractive, especially coming from an urban landscape that doesn’t have much to offer in terms of nearby green space to break up the swaths of pavement. The fortified old city sits on a rise at the confluence of two rivers that have dug deep gorges around it over time. Although I don’t know whether it was always thus, the city planners have decided to keep much of this surrounding area as parkland, creating a verdant ring around a lot of the city. Old stone bridges with soaring arches connect the area we were staying in with the inner district. One of the major surprises was the Petrusse River. On the map it looks about half as wide as the Alzette. In reality, it is a pencil-thin stream in a concrete channel for as much of its length as we could see--definitely not shown to scale.

After stopping for lunch at a health and wellness store that featured yoga videos and a menu of 5 items (including, fortunately, tasty gazpacho [many places were no longer serving lunch at 3:30]) and watching people across the square exit city hall after having been married, we went on a walking tour of the city. The main square featured a variety of restaurants, including McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Chi-Chis, among other, lesser stars. There were also a handful of people offering their services, including a Victorian-looking woman you could get your picture taken with and two portraitists. A band consisting of high-school-age kids was playing such popular tunes as the theme from the James Bond movies in a gazebo.

We walked along the city walls overlooking the landscape below. We wandered in and out of cool churches (where the first photo was taken). We whiffed the most odoriferous eternal flame ever--what were they using as fuel, we wondered, rotten vegetables? We marveled at the houses below that were built into the cliff face, which we imagine not only saves the cost of having to build a back wall, but also keeps the indoor climate temperate year-round. Some of the back yards were accessible from the second floor or roof, because the rocks receded away from the building and there was space to create a small flat patch of land to garden in. The views reminded me of nothing so much as a 5,000-piece puzzle. Eventually, after having walked around for a good while, we stopped for a beer at a small corner bar with outside tables. We agreed that a good time was being had by all, and after a decent interval went to dinner at an Italian place that had been recommended by the guidebook (not the one at our hotel, though, which seemed to be empty everytime we went by). I had a pizza and Jack had pasta with fresh porcini mushrooms, and we expressed our mutual disgust over the ceramic wine carafe, which had been stained with the sediment of many years’ worth of red wines.

Later, we returned to the main square to hear a few songs performed by a much more professional band. There was a young woman on percussion in the back, nearest to us, who seemed to enjoy the cowbell more than anything, her waist-length blond hair bobbing in time with the beat as she got into it. Before heading back we stopped off to check out a few minutes of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, which was being shown in a courtyard of a playhouse. After a few more photos in the waning evening light, it was back to the hotel for a night of restless dozing.