Luxembourg: Day 1

Back from our first weekend trip! It consisted of two days crammed full of adventure, and I'm pretty exhausted (and have lots of homework to begin soon), but it was amazing.

We left planning a little late (a lesson learned that won't be repeated next time), but the seven dudes I'm traveling with and I managed to finalize plans on Friday night to go for a two-day trip to Luxembourg. We left Saturday morning from Metz, stayed the night in the City of Luxembourg, and saw Vianden before heading back to Metz Sunday evening.

La Gare de Luxembourg (Lux's train station) is quite unique on the inside, with high-arched painted ceilings and beautiful stained-glass windows on the ends. There's a WWII memorial inside for some sort of victims; we couldn't tell what the reason of their deaths was from what we could read on the bottom, only that they were victims of some horrible thing. It was relatively cheap to get there by train, around 14 Euros.

We found a place to eat right nextdoor to Hotel Yasha, where the nice owner drew a napkin-map of the city for us and highlighted a few places to go see. We saw the city cathedral, a few war memorials, noticed and appreciated that there's a big street named after FDR, admired the huge valley that opens up towards the city center (there's a big old fort/battlement thing down inside the valley), and got into the Musee national d'histoire et d'art Luxembourg (Lux National History and Art Museum) for free with our student status.

Afterwards, it was about dinner time so we stopped at the White Rose sports bar and watched some football (the original kind). This is the place where I had my first EVER beer--so now I have an interesting story to tell whenever somebody asks me where my first beer was, if that ever happens. The brand was Diekirch, a local favorite that is made in a town not much more than 20 minutes away. We actually rode through it on the way to the castle on Day 2.

After dinner, we checked into our hotel, where we met two Israeli girls who were on a 12-day trip through Europe. One was an officer in the military, and the other was just finishing up her service and is going to start back at school this coming fall. They told us of their travels through Belgium and recommended a few hostels to try. We all went to get dessert at a local restaurant, where I got a strawberry crepe, and then a few of us went out to watch the Milan v. FC Bayern Munich (I hope that's spelled correctly...) game while the rest of us crashed at the hotel.

Continued...