Diekirch, Clervaux, and Luxembourg City
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2009
1
4
20
Trip End
May 05, 2009
Clervaux,
Diekirch,
Luxembourg
Saturday, January 10, 2009
On the last day of orientation they took us to Diekirch, Luxembourg. We ate a delicious meal at their brand new high school-- it's HUGE and very modern. With lunch, we had two lecturers. One spoke on Medieval times, and the other spoke on World War Two. Apparently some of the famous Battle of the Bulge took place in Diekirch, particularly along the river which is right across from the school we ate at
Clerveaux
. As a refresher for you, in this battle there were over 89,000 American casualties and losses, not to mention the massive casualties/losses suffered by other countries. Yikes.After this, we went to the National War Museum, which was overflowing with WWII artifacts... huge guns, tanks, photographs, supplies, letters, flags, etc... See pictures.
After this, we got on the buses and they took us to Clarveaux. Clarveaux is absolutely GORGEOUS! Unfortunately, when we drove through the city I did not get to take any pictures, so this picture actually comes from the Clarveaux website. At the top of the tree line you can see a steeple. That was our final destination. Here we went to observe a prayer vigil put on by monks. The monks are very old except for a few of them. I guess monk-dom is dying out. At the vigil they did Gregorian chanting almost the entire time. It was... kind of weird. Also kind of boring. But I'm glad I had the chance to do this and to observe it.
After this, Liz, Marissa, Jenny, Katie, and I went back to Lux City because we were DONE WITH ORIENTATION!! That was a happy thing. We planned on going to dinner and a movie (there's a GINORMAMUNGOUS movie theater in the city)
Diekirch
. We decided we weren't that hungry, so we just wanted to get some dessert. Everything has really weird hours here, so even though it was only 8:30 we couldn't find anywhere that was open and served dessert. We finally found something. It was a slightly ritzy restaurant named Bella Napoli. We were seated and the waiter began taking our order... and then bad stuff happened. When we began ordering, he asked us incredously, "Just dessert for you?" When we said yes, and that all of us were just ordering dessert, he began visually upset. After much complaining and negative body language, he took our order. In Europe, waiters go to college to be waiters, and they are really, really good at what they do. Consequently, they don't have to serve you if they don't want to, and they don't HAVE to be nice to you. Of course, we didn't know that just ordering dessert was wrong, so it was a silly mistake, but he seemed pretty upset with us. He had someone else from the kitchen bring us our food, clear our table, and made us sit for about 35-40 minutes before bringing us our check. By this time, we had missed our movie, so we just decided to go home. You live and you learn.So, we head to the trainstation, look at the boards, and find the next train to Luxembourg leaving from track 9ab. We climb on the train and look for a seat. Suddenly, we realize that there's nobody on the train... We're a little confused, but it was late at night, so we figured this was a possibility, UNTIL THE LIGHTS TURNED OFF!! We ran to the door, but it was locked. We were panicking a tiny bit, but luckily a train worker walked by. We banged on the door and got his attention. He tried opening the door and couldn't either, but he found a key and was able to get it open after a few minutes. As we piled out he was yelling at us in some language we didn't understand. We thanked him and tried to ignore his yelling, just happy we made it out fairly easily. Whew. What a crazy day.
On a different note, later that evening, Maga told me the first English words she learned were, "How are you? Give me chocolate, please." She said that the American soldiers would give them chocolate... but the first time she ate it she bit right through the wrapper, not knowing that you were supposed to remove it.
