Shhhh! The Luxembourgians are sleeping!

Have you ever stopped and thought about how terrible Guns and Roses lyrics are? Neil and I did, and it entertained us for days. "You know where you are baby? You're in the jungle. You're gonna die!"

Terrible.

Amsterdam is too far away from Gimmelwald to get there in a day so we had to break up our journey. Well, actually, it's more the lack of high speed rail running between the two places. So we decided to add another country to the list: Luxembourg.

A small country, and from what we've learned on this trip, smaller seems to be better. It's easier to see everything and get a full sense of what a place is like in a short time if the place is small. Makes sense. And so far small places have lead to the most adventure. AND the day we're arriving in Luxembourg City happens to be the biggest national holiday of the year! It's bound to be a party!

Except it wasn't.

It seems as though the national holiday party happens the night before the national holiday, unlike Canada Day, or Independence Day for example. Actually, we don't know that for sure, but we feel comfortable in that assumption given that we didn't see very many people and everything was closed. Actually, that's what we're really hoping, otherwise Luxembourg is one dull place.

We spent the evening hanging out with a guy from England sharing our dorm with us. First we looked for a restuarant that was open and affordable ( difficult because Luxembourg is pricey... and closed). Then we tried to find a place that would serve us cheap drinks....

....We ended up back at our hostel bar... which had no one in it and closed at 10pm. Hmmm.

So mostly we sat around making fun of how boring Luxembourg seemed to be, until a few more young people came and joined us. A couple of Brazilians informed us that last night had, in fact, been a real party. And a couple of Germans told Neil and myself that they'd seen us at the Swiss/French border in Basel. Actually, Neil and I crossed the border three times on foot. First we got off our Swiss train and walked into France to catch our French train, and then we went back into Switzerland to check if we needed reservations for our French train. We were told that we didn't, so we went back to France.

The Germans happened to watch us, realised we didn't really know what we were doing, and had a laugh. They were pretty funny guys. Apparently their part of Germany has a party that starts in January and ends at some random time according to the lunar calendar. This year it lasted "only three months".... Yeah. Stark contrast to Luxembourg right there. And it probably explains why they had wine to share with us.

And we pretty much went to bed early. I guess our Luxembourg timing was terrible. But it will be the butt end of jokes for years to come. I'll probably often refer to it as the "Saskatchewan of Europe". Burn.

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