Fall Break '10: Luxembourg

Hello everyone! I should be better at updating, but alas, I'm lazy. I also just came back from Belfast, which was a very boring trip. But more on that later.

So, anyway, on the 19th Anna, Stephanie, and I took a train to Luxembourg City. It was cold and rainy there, but luckily the hotel was right across the street from the station. Also, French and German are spoken in Luxembourg, so once again I could get by very easily. We checked into our hotel, which was the nicest we've been in so far, and set out sight seeing.

First picture in Luxembourg!

We walked around for a bit, and decided to go into a museum because it had started raining hard. It was a museum on the history of Luxembourg, which wasn't that interesting. The most interesting exhibit was about teenagers and their culture. They focused on the music, clothing, sex, personal identity, language, etc. of adolescents.

Afterwards we set out again to explore the outside. There's a very scenic area with castle ruins and cliff over looking parts of the city. The buildings were so classical European, yet in the background you could see modern skyscrapers.

Luckily it got sunny out, but not for long. We had a map that had all the places we could visit. What we really wanted to find was The Three Towers, which at the time I had no idea what they were, I just followed Stephanie and Anna. There were some places we didn't know how to get to and when we tried to find a path it would just lead us into private property. Then it started hailing, then raining. I pointed out a random path and we just took it to see where it lead us.

=)

Consulting a map

Hail!

Eventually we walked into a forest, which lead us to a museum of modern art, which lead us to what we assumed were the three towers. It looked like it was part of castle, but they had built classrooms or something on the inside. Really, all we did was walk around, but there was so much to see as well.

Three Towers?

We started heading back to our hotel because it was getting dark. For dinner we stopped at Quick Burger, which is a European fast food chain, and went back to our hotel. Watching TV was amusing. Only CNN was in English, but everything else was in German and French.

The next day we were woken up to sounds of construction. It wasn't that bad because we were waking up early anyway, but the hotel manager apologized and said he'd leave us something. We walked around in the city centre looking for souvenirs. We went into a bookstore and I bought the first book in the Tin Tin series. Tin Tin is a  comic book series from Belgium about a reporter named Tin Tin and his dog snowy who go all over the world. It's in French, but I found it in the young adult section so I should be able to handle the reading level. Before we left France a I bought a volume of Dragon Ball Z in French :)

I also bought a pretty glass necklace in a German store. While we were walking we saw the Royal Family in their car pass by. The palace is right in the city centre. There were a bunch of tourists outside the palace, waiting to get a picture of the prince or king. Stephanie bought a postcard of his face because they had postcards of the royal family.

The Royal Palace

We stopped for hot chocolate and cake in a little cafe. You choose the type of chocolate you want; it's attached to a wooden spoon, and they give you hot milk. All you do it put the chocolate in the milk and it melts, giving you extremely delicious hot chocolate. The servings of cake were huge, so we were all sugared out. Once it stopped raining we went exploring in the areas we haven't been to. There wasn't much left to see. We did found the Three Towers, because what we saw the day before wasn't. The real ones...not as great.

Apparently these were the Three Towers...

By 4 or 5 pm we had seen everything there was to see. So we went back to city centre. All the shops close pretty early, like 5 or 6 PM. Anna and Stephanie wanted to try the local beer, so we went to a pub. It was 2 euro a pint, which is waaaaaay cheaper than any pint you can buy in Dublin. For dinner we ate at Pizza Hut, which was more like an Italian restaurant than the normal take-out place in the States. We all went to bed because we were catching a train to Amsterdam the next day!

Remember, check out the full album on Facebook to see all the pictures!