Lux

This all began in Antwerp, where I got a hold of Quentin and made plans to meet in Luxembourg. He picked some random town way in the north (like 37km north of the capital) and I planned on hitching or training to mee him. Alas, it was too difficult so I took the train to the capital directly and texted him to meet me at the station. It worked. Odd.

I had secured us a couch and a welcome picnic through the last minute couch list in Luxembourg. A Belgian responded and said he could host but lived 20 minutes out of town--like a suburb or something.

We walked in to town and found a nice ped-mall, a lot of banks, and a big park. Finally, an hour later, after a couple beers in the park, we met up with the picnic which was pretty awesome. People from all over, enough opportunity for me to speak French but everyone could speak english too for Quentin.

Many beers, Belgian ones, strong, and then I joined some frisbee players (I still got it). From 5:30 to 11 we hung out and ate and drank; pretty ideal.

Then, to a bar; some guy from the picnic paid for our beer as a "welcome" gesture--clearly the Luxembourgians don't get enough visitors--but then it was time to go catch the train to go home. In another country. In fact, we took the last train to Belgium, which the Luxebourgish see as a suburb of Luxembourg. Belgium?!?!?

Shit. I knew about this, in fact, before--that we had to sleep in Belgium, but Quentin was a little annoyed, having just left Belgium earlier that day. And then I was annoyed that it was 10€. Shit. It was only 1.50€ to take the train anywhere in Luxembourg. Clearly, crossing the border is expensive. But that much more?!?! The first in a string of unwelcome surprises. Annoyed.

Other surprises, though we got to the apartment at 12:30 am, Pierre had to work in the morning so we had to be out by 7am. Shit. But whatever. We made it, got up, even sneaked in a couple showers--but no breakfast. Then Pierre insisted on powerwalking to the train. So I said that we would say goodbye there and mosey. Yup, mosey. I don't know if he knows that word, but it's really the only perfect word for the situation. We moseyed and decided to avoid the extra border fee and to walk to the next small town in Luxembourg and only pay 1.50€. The hike, of course, ended up being more like 10km, 3 hours, through small towns and over hill and dale. Beautiful. We had a couple fence crossing incidents, but my antibiotic cream saved me from an infection. And I got a big blister. But we had a great time and got to catch up--a little bit of RAGBRAI on foot and in Europe. And sans parties. But lovely.

Luxembourg is nice but it's a little overrun with bratty, spoiled douchey teens. And it's beautiful out--totally summer--which is apparently not normal.