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Published: October 29th 2006
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Zoom Zoom
Nice car. Not too surprised to see it parallel parked here. The train over from Namur was pretty peaceful until we got to the border with Luxemburg. Just before the border, the conductors came around and told those of us in the back few cars that we needed to move forward, as the train was going to leave some cars behind at the last station in Belgium. I grabbed my stuff and moved to the car they had said to go to. As I sat down, I discovered that I had arrived in the under-20 rebel-without-a-cause car. It was full of smoking (banned on the train, but they didn't seem to care), drinking, black-leather wearing teenagers. Now, I'm sure you're all hoping to hear that they started fighting or something interesting like that, but alas, it was just a bunch of (probably) rich Luxemburg kids trying to rebel against god knows what. "The man", I guess. Thankfully, the ride past the border only took 20 minutes or so. After all, Luxemburg isn't exactly huge.
I got off in one piece and set off for the hostel. The city didn't quite live up to the LP's description, but it was pretty nonetheless. Unfortunately for me, the hostel was at the bottom of
Mickey D's
Fanciest McDonalds I've seen to date. a huge hill (gorge really), so that meant that I had to go back up the hill to do anything in town. Ah well, can't win them all. It was another one of the sterile HI hostels, and it seemed mostly empty. I dumped my stuff and set off to make the most of the one day that I had to spend.
The city center is quite small, and it only took a couple hours to walk around and see the whole thing. After a bit of walking I got hungry and considered my options. From wandering, I had pretty much narrowed it to three choices: McDonalds, Quality (hmm) Burger, and the only kebab place I could find. Now, the McDonalds in Luxemburg appeared to be top-notch, but I just wasn't in the mood for a burger, so that pretty much whittled the list down to the kebab place. It turned out to be pretty decent, although I still haven't found one that matched the ones in Germany.
No longer hungry, I set about finding a place to sit and let the food digest a bit (quite important with kebab I've found). I came across a nice square
Lower city
Looking down on one of the neighborhoods. where I sat in the sun watching the world go by. After a couple hours of dozing in the sun, I decided it would be prudent to locate some food for dinner. Is it clear how the search for food guides my day? Being a Sunday, in Europe, grocery stores were closed. The woman at the hostel had mentioned that the best bet was a gas station for groceries. She also mentioned that it would be difficult for me to get to without a car. She obviously underestimated my tenacity when confronted with nothing to do and dinner rapidly approaching. I had a map, but didn't have any idea where the gas station actually was. So, after careful consideration of potential station locations on the map (near or en-route to motorways), I picked a likely direction and set off. After about 30 minutes of walking, I started coming across people carrying baguettes with the Shell logo on the wrapper. I found that to be a very promising sign, and so I followed the figurative trail of breadcrumbs right to the shell station. I was in fact successful in my mission to locate "the" gas station, as this is obviously where
Geology
Luxemburg City is known for it's geology. everyone goes on a sunday to get food.
Having picked up a baguette and other staples (junk food, mostly) I headed back. It was such a beautiful day that I couldn't help but walk the long way around following the river through the gorge below the city center. By the time I got back, I decided it was dinner time, mostly because I had already consumed half of the baguette on the walk. I mean, what was I supposed to do, the thing was fresh out of the oven, and quite tasty. I digress. I grabbed my nutella and sat down in the cafeteria for a nutritious dinner.
While I was eating I was listening to the conversation at the next table; mainly because it was in English. Eventually, I decided to go and join them (Aussie dude, and and a Canadian girl) and we started talking about everyone's favorite topic -- America! Now, I'm partly responsible for some of these conversations, but in reality, I think it's the alcohol that gets me going. Wait, did I mention we had started drinking? Oops. Well, yeah, so we were drinking and talking about the US, among other things, when we were joined by another American from Ohio. I don't really remember where the conversation went from there, but I do recall that we were the only people left in the bar/cafeteria and we were coming up on the ungodly hour of (prepare yourselves) 11pm. At least that's what my watch said. But I didn't believe it. Surely it must have been later. I mean, the woman at the bar told us (in a very stern manner) that we were not going to have any more drinks. We protested. Well, the Aussie protested and I helped, and she finally relented and poured us 2 more (in plastic cups no less). Sheesh, you'd have thought that we were preventing her from doing her job (serving drinks) or something the way we got cut off. Haha, oh well, it was a fun evening. At least until I got back to the dorm room.
Now, the last time I was in the room was about 3 pm and it was half full. However, when I got in shortly after 11 it was packed. I was a bit surprised, I mean most hostels aren't exactly packed on sunday night at this time of the year. However, being full wasn't the problem. The problem was lying in the bunk directly above mine. Now, the problem itself actually consisted of three separate subproblems (engineers beware!) that I will address in turn.
Problem 1 (50 points):
A (15 points): The person in the bunk above me was coughing, sneezing, sniffling, and generally being sick 1 meter above me. Not good. This is where I started wondering if I washed my hands before brushing my teeth, etc. I'm not normally overparanoid with sick people, it's just that dorm rooms really make it easy for people to pass stuff on, and having been sick already on this trip I wanted to avoid it if possible.
B (10 points): The person previously mentioned is unable to sleep, possibly due to the aforementioned illness. As a result, said person tosses and turns all night, waking me up repeatedly. Bugger.
C (25 points): Now this one really takes the cake because the other two aren't really the guys fault, I'm just going to blame them on him anyway. At 4:50am (I checked) he decided to get out of bed and start packing his bag. For the next 30 minutes. With lots of plastic bag rustling (can't have it any other way). Fuck. He did eventually leave, but I didn't get much more sleep before I had to get up to go catch the train.
D (5 points E.C.) It was raining when I got up.
I did manage to get to the train station without getting completely soaked, but it was a pretty miserable walk. That's about it for Luxemburg, Paris is next so stay tuned.
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