The second half of this trip begins as I leave Maastricht on a train bound for Liège...
Saturday 22 June
And now it was a short hop to Liège on an SNCB train. SNCB is the Belgian national carrier, and I don't think they maintain their trains quite as well as DB or NS. It would be an exaggeration to call this train a "rickety old box" but the fact that it had graffiti all over it doesn't exactly make it a good representative for SNCB. Anyway, it did its job, which was to take me to Liège, so I can't complain.
Liège is a small city in the French-speaking part of Belgium. I didn't have enough time to explore it, only an hour between trains. All I could do was walk out of the station, down one street where I could look at several bars, restaurants, and shops but not stop in them, and then turn around and go back.
How much thought did they put into that logo?
Liège-Guillemins is definitely one of the more beautiful modern train stations I've seen.
The next two hours were among the most boring of my life. This was another slow regional train that was little different from what you could've been riding with NJ Transit 25+ years ago. There's nothing wrong with that--after all I'm a big proponent of "if it ain't broke don't fix it"--but some WiFi would've been nice. All I had to read was a single QST magazine which I got bored of real quick, and there wasn't much in the way of scenery outside. Plus it was getting late and I was getting hungry, and there was no food service car on this train.
Finally after two hours which felt like a lot longer, the train pulled into Gare de Luxembourg where the first thing I did was buy a big fish salad for dinner.
After taking some pictures of the station and of a downtown map outside it, which I rightly concluded would be useful later in such a place where my phone was dependent on WiFi for data, I crossed the street from the station and just kept walking straight. I was looking for a bar where I could have my first local beer. But, nothing I saw appealed to me. Whatever neighborhood I had found myself in was somewhat run-down, all the bars were dives, and there was an alarming amount of "cabarets" (strip clubs) I kept passing by. This can't be downtown Luxembourg? I thought. I looked at that map I had taken a picture of, and saw that it wasn't; downtown is NORTH of the train station, I had gone directly WEST. So, it was back to the station and then north...
The first place I stopped was an Irish pub, called Lucky 14. This is starting to become a tradition for me: stop and have a beer at an Irish pub in every city I visit. It sure seems like every city has at least one. I did not, however, have a Guinness or any other Irish beer at this pub; I had a Diekirch. This was one of the local beers brewed in Luxembourg (the country but not the city). It wasn't bad! But it wasn't distinguishable from a thousand other lagers and Pilsners I've had. After I was done there I continued my hike into the city center.
Not a lot of people know exactly what language they speak in Luxembourg. And it's not exactly a simple question to answer. What I'm about to describe applies to the capital city; I don't know how things are in the countryside. They have three official languages, though one of which (German) seems to be mostly ignored. The language most people speak with each other is Luxembourgish, which is very similar to German. I overheard many people speaking it, and it was close enough to German that I could kind of understand it, a little. It used to be considered a mere "dialect" of German, just like Swiss and Schwäbisch, until the last century when it got official status and they were able to standardize spelling for it. Even so, there isn't a whole lot of signage or books or other print material in it; most of that stuff is in French.
This is more Luxembourgish text than one usually sees in an advertisement. This is a place where Luxembourgers can renew their driver's licenses. Most other signage in the city is typically in French.
French is the formal, prestige language, which everyone grew up speaking at school even as they chatted amongst themselves in Luxembourgish. If you go into a restaurant or bar, you order in French. Most of the books and newspapers are in French, as are all the billboards and advertisements and such, as well as the TV news.
German is the third offical language, but like I said it's mostly ignored, at least in the capital, which is all about French and Luxembourgish. The only people I heard speaking German were tourists from Germany.
Back to the trip...as I walked further into downtown I started to notice that something special was going on. Many areas downtown were crowded to such a degree that it reminded me of San Antonio's annual Fiesta, where I'd been two months earlier. And plus there were people waving little flags and carrying balloons everywhere.
Seriously, this is just like Fiesta San Fernando, or NIOSA, or...actually I take that last one back. This is actually pretty spacious compared to NIOSA.
There were so many street corners where people had gathered and there were DJ booths spinning various genres of dance music and concession stands slinging beer and sausage. Finally I stopped at one where the DJ was pumping out Sister Sledge's disco classic "He's The Greatest Dancer" where I saw a TV screen with the words: "Mir wënschen iech e schéinen Nationalfeierdag!" Which, I presume due to its similarity to German, is Luxembourgish for "We wish you a happy National Holiday!" And plus I saw some cups at one place that said "National Day" (in English) on them. That's when I finally put two and two together and realized I had arrived in Luxembourg during their version of Fourth of July.
And so I spent the rest of that evening wandering through the festivities and trying out the different beers on tap at the stands outside. As the sun was finally going down, I made it to one place where a parade was going through. Not quite as huge a production as Fiesta Flambeau, but still something to see. I watched as Luxembourg's equivalent of the Boy & Girl Scouts went by carring flaming torches, followed by a Portuguese folkloric group (there is a sizeable Portuguese immigrant community in Luxembourg).
And when the sky was finally dark...fireworks!
Eventually I had had enough to drink and was tired from all the day's walking around so I needed to get to my hotel. Yes, hotel, not hostel. When I booked this trip I couldn't find any available cheap hostels, and plus sometimes you just have to treat yourself, right? Unfortunately the hotel I was staying at, Ibis Budget, was not in the city but a few km south of it on a highway, out of reach of public transit, requiring me to take a taxi.
MyTaxi (or "Free Now" as it is known now) apparently doesn't work in Luxembourg, and the chances of finding one in the middle of this party were nonexistent, so I had to head back to the train station to find a taxi. Getting back there was more difficult than coming from there earlier; by now it was about midnight and there were way more people living it up downtown, and some points were choked with NIOSA-level crowding. In one such crush of people there were two guys I seriously thought were about to get into a fight. And at that same time someone slammed into me, causing me to spill my drink all over my arm and on someone else! What is this, a mosh pit? I squeezed out of there as quickly as I could, made it to the train station where I found a taxi cab to drive me to Ibis Budget, which cost me 50€ (ugh).
Ibis Budget was a nice hotel with door locks I've never seen in any other hotel. No key, no card; instead a numeric keypad on which you type the code they give you at the front desk.
Sunday 23 June
Just like everywhere else I've stayed in this part of the world: great breakfast. Müsli, fruits, sliced deli meat...I got my fill and then checked out. But since this hotel was outside the city on a highway intersection, and I wasn't about to drop another 50€ on another taxi, getting back into the city was going to take some time. I had to spend some time walking west (about 20-30 minutes) into an exurb called Bettembourg.
There was a rail station in the center of town, where I discovered that trains into the city were cancelled every Sunday that month, but in their place they had a bus service making the same trip at the same times. And so after waiting some more I rode said bus back into Luxembourg city.
So last night was the big downtown party; today I was going to see some sights. I knew Luxembourg was a monarchy, thus there must be some kind of palace. My iPhone's map app directed me to the Grand-Ducal Palace which I reached after a bit of a hike.
Not exactly Buckingham Palace (this is, after all, merely a grand duchy and not a kingdom), but still something to see. They have ceremonially-uniformed guards marching in front of the gate.
I was a bit hungry by then since it was about noon, so I went looking for a place nearby to eat lunch. The area where I was searching, right next to the palace, started to look familiar. Pretty soon, when I noticed a restaurant called Urban, I realized I was in the same area where the disco-spinning DJ was the night before. All that time I spent there last night, and I never knew for a second that I was right down the street from the palace! I ended up stopping for lunch at Urban, where I had yet another salad. This one I think had grilled chicken. And also, even though I was mostly laying off of alcohol today, I had to have a beer with lunch. This one was called Battin and I liked it a lot better than the Diekirch and Bofferding I had the night before.
Next, I wanted to see the Natural History Museum. I had read in a "featured" front-page Wikipedia article that they had a skeleton there of an ancient human that had been found in the area and was part of an ancient settlement wave that was unrelated to today's Europeans. I wanted to see this and learn more about its background, but unfortunately the museum was closed, even though it was during opening hours. Must have something to do with the previous day's holiday. So, I stopped at a nearby Scottish pub, called Scott's Pub, for a small glass of stout before continuing my wandering.
I saw a bit of this while on the walk/bike trails in this part of the city. You see gardens like this quite often in Germany, and apparently it's a thing in Luxembourg too. Many people want to grow gardens, but they don't have any space at their homes, so they rent spaces like this for the purpose of having a garden.
It was getting late so I started to head back to the Gare. On the way stopped at a convenience store and bought some Müsli, and at a coffee shop where I had some coffee and bought a couple bags of beans. Then as I'm on my final hike to the train station, I pass by a cathedral around which police have set up fences and blocked off traffic, there are crowds forming around the fences, ceremonial guards lining the cathedral entrance, and bells cacophonically bonging. I asked some random American (I've encountered more in that city than even Amsterdam) I was in front of what was going on. She said that the prime minister had just arrived and would be soon followed by the grand duke. And sure enough, a limo pulled up and...
...out stepped Grand Duke Henri and his wife Maria Teresa. They gave everyone a wave before walking into the cathedral.
That was the first time I'd ever seen a sitting head of state in person, not to mention a reigning monarch. That was a nice way to end the adventure. I finished the hike back to the train station, bought another fish salad like I had the day before, which I saved for later.
A series of three trains, none of which I missed, delivered me home. First was a CFL (Luxembourg's national railway) Intercity which took me across the German border to Trier. This was a nice modern double-decker like the Dutch Intercity I'd ridden into Maastricht the night before last. Only drawback: no WiFi, so I had to wait till I crossed the border before my phone had any internet access. The second was a DB Regio which spent three hours going from Trier to Mannheim. This train was more similar to an S-Bahn than to the other regional trains I'd been on this weekend, and it took awhile due to all the stops it made (Saarbrücken, Kaiserslautern, etc.). After that was done, it was a quick ICE hop from Mannheim to Stuttgart and that's a wrap.
A souvenir I picked up Saturday night: one of the flags all the partygoers were waving around downtown.
