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Published: February 2nd 2009
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So another weekend and another adventure. This past weekend I traveled to Strasbourg, France. It is only a two hour train ride from Luxembourg City. After classes on Friday we went home to get all of our stuff together and took the 4:10 train to Strasbourg. We got into Strasbourg around 6:30. I was already dark out and we had to find our way to our hostel. We had to take a 5 minute walk and then catch a tram. They have trams that go all over the city. They don't have as many buses or trains, the main form of public transportation in the main city center are the trams. These trams look like trains, but are more like buses. They run down the streets but are on guided tracks. Once we got off the tram we had to bust out our map to try and figure out how to get to the hostel from there. It took us about 15 minutes and some wandering to find the hostel. Once we got checked in and settled we headed out for dinner. We tried walking to the tram station and ended up eventually found one, but it was the one we
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our dining area originally got on by the tram station. The next morning we got up and found the actual way to the tram station near our hostel and it was only a 5 minute walk. We headed into town and shopped around for most of the day. We just walked all over the whole city, stopping in shops here and there and stopping at some of the sites on the way. We found a really fun cafe for breakfast. They had the best croissants. They were still hot and tasted so good. After breakfast we found the cathedral and toured that. In the cathedral they have an astronomical clock so it was cool to see that. We shopped around some more and I found some slippers for 2 euro. I definitely need some so when I found them for 70% off I had to get them. (Not to mention there is animal print on them too!) We found another bakery to get lunch. They are all so good and the bread is so fresh. I had a 1/4 baguette, mini-croissant and a hot chocolate. I found in the city that many of the restaurants are very into creating "formulas". (Which is like
just different type of meals with different options of the food for a cheaper price. Like a drink+entree+dessert for a cheaper price.) So that's what my lunch was, it ended up saving me 2 Euros. After lunch we continued to walk around. We went and walked around Petite France. It was a fun little area with stone streets and fun restaurants and areas to walk around. We went back by the hostel before going out to find dinner and then we made another adventure on the trams. For dinner we found a pasta place. In a way it is kind of like Smoothie King. You go up and order your noodles and they have all these crazy names for the types of sauce to put on. Mine was called Creamy Carbo, which had cheeses and alfredo sauce with parmesan cheese on top and some small chunks of ham. Emily's was called Bollywood, which was a chicken curry with some other spices. After you pick your sauce then they have all these extra toppings/spices you can add. It was actually really good and the lady that worked there was really friendly and helped us with our ordering. After we had time
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everyone still has their Christmas decorations up and didn't want to sit around in the hostel so we headed to the Mexican restaurant across the street. It was very interesting. All the food didn't look like traditional Mexican food we might find in the states, though it was called the same names. We just had an ice cream dessert that was so good. We just sat at the bar and got to people watch. Let’s say we saw some interesting people around. hah Sunday we woke up and got ready for the day. We just had the morning so we went to the contemporary art museum. On the first Sunday of every month the museums are free. So we definitely took advantage of that and saved those activities for Sunday morning. Pretty much everything is closed on Sundays so we ended up just taking the tram around to see more of the outskirts of the city. I think I finally have the whole tram system down. There are 5 lines and you have to go from one to another at different stops to get where you are needing to go. So I can successfully get from line E over to line B to get to the center
of town to get on line A to get over near Petite France. Tickets were 1.40 euro for every trip. We paid for the first time and realized that no one ever checks them. So we found that for the two days we were there it would be ok to just jump on. As bad as it is, we ended up saving a few bucks because of that. No one ever came by to check them. Emily and I joke that we should write a book 'How to Travel Europe on a Dime'. Were getting pretty good at figuring out where we can save money between food, activities and transportation. We took the 14:00 train back to Luxembourg city. As we arrived back in Luxembourg snow started falling. We just missed our bus so we had to wait 40 minutes for the next bus to come. That is definitely one downside to public transportation, all the time you have to spend waiting for it. Once we got home we grabbed our computers and headed to the internet cafe we found in the city. There are always crazy stories from the internet cafe...last night this one guy came up and started
banging on the glass window near our seat. We had no idea what he wanted or why he was banging so we tried to ignore him. He continued to bang and then point to his mp3 player. We were so confused so just turned the other way. He ended up coming into the internet cafe so Emily and I were like oh goodness what does he want. He ends up coming up to Emily and what he wanted the whole time was to plug his mp3 player into her computer to get music. He then claimed he thought we were 'Luxembourg girls' otherwise he would have never asked. Sometimes we find some shady characters in the city. Though, it always gives us some entertainment. When we got home from the internet cafe our host family had some guests over. This is the third time in the past week, so we got chocolate and cake out of the deal. They are becoming social bees, but I love it because every time someone is over we get food out of the deal. I guess when you’re a college student saving up for weekend travels any free food you get is GREAT food.
This past weekend was another successful weekend of travel. I enjoyed getting to see the 'French' town. It just gets more interesting every time I travel somewhere new and get to meet more new local people and learn about the different customs and culture by talking with people or just watching people.
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