LUXEMBOURG CITY

Luxembourg is one of the places we decided to visit when we took a longer, more scenic route home to France, after visiting family in England.

Luxembourg is the sixth smallest country, and the only Grand Duchy in the world. The country measures just 51 miles maximum North-South by 32 miles maximum East-West. The population numbers roughly 420,000 and comprises the highest proportion of inhabitants with a foreign passport among the EU countries. Luxembourg also has more Michelin-starred Restaurants per square mile or per head of inhabitant than any other country in the world ... not sure what the French would say to that! Luxembourg is also the world's 8th largest banking centre. The 1997 film, American Werewolf in Paris, was filmed in Luxembourg as was, Shadow of the Vampire.

Poor old Richard had been doing all of the driving as is quite usual. We were both fairly tired by the time we arrived in Luxembourg, not quite sure why I felt tired ... oh yeah, it must have been all of the map reading I was doing! Well that's not exactly true because as well as doing all of the driving, Richard always shows me the route on the map before we head off, so basically I just remind him of the route he has chosen! Anyway as I said we were tired and fed up being in the car so as soon as we hit the centre of Luxembourg I began to look for hotels. Ideally we would have liked one that had it's own car park or at least valet parking, no such luck though. We were looking for parking when I saw a Best Western hotel, we have stayed in these before and they are fine. So we parked up in a nearby road and went in to see if there were any vacancies. This hotel was right across the road from the railway station and it was very busy, but they did have a couple of rooms available. Thankfully the man on reception spoke perfect French, so we were able to communicate without any problems, which was good because neither of us speak any Luxemburgish! As it turned out when he saw our passports he spoke perfect English too ... better than us! The Best Western Hotel International **** 20-22 Place de la Gare, B.P. 1683, L- 1016 Luxembourg-ville (Tel: 0 03 52 48 59 11), was in a good location, just a 15 minute walk from all of the best bars, restaurants and shops. After we checked in I went for an afternoon nap, whilst Richard went out to have a look round. Once Richard returned from his walk I was feeling refreshed and we both went out. We had a good long walk round taking photo's, if only the sun had been out everything would have looked so much more prettier. Everywhere we went there seemed to be lots of other tourists, mainly Asian coach tours who were merrily snapping away with their cameras at every opportunity. After we had taken in the sights we stopped off for a beer or two. Richard was especially happy because the first bar we went into had Strongbow Cider on draught. Obviously we can't get Strongbow where we live in France, so usually Richard only gets to enjoy a cold pint when we go back to England. After being in England it felt very cold, probably because neither of us had taken any winter coats with us, we were still in our summer frame of mind and our summer wardrobe! The cold didn't spoil our enjoyment of Luxembourg, there were some great sights, and shops, and bars and the people were so friendly and everywhere was so clean. Whilst Richard had been out on his walk earlier in the day he had seen lots of restaurants, two in particular took his fancy. One was Japanese the other Indian, not very traditional I know. Richard couldn't decide which he felt like eating at for dinner, so I chose, Indian. Big mistake! The restaurant was nice, and very busy which is usually a good sign, not this time though. We ordered a couple of meat dishes, one vegetable dish, a rice dish, and a nann bread. The nann was interesting, basically it had coconut inside, nothing unusual about that, but it had lots of tinned fruit salad on top. The rice was fine but the meat dishes were very disappointing, one of them was so hot we couldn't even eat it ... and we both like vindaloo! The meat dishes had no flavour at all they were just burning HOT! Oh well that will teach us, we should have eaten some of the local cuisine. Apparently about 10% of the population of Luxembourg are of Portuguese descent and speak Portuguese. It felt very similar to being in London with a good mix of different nationalities and cultures. Everywhere was very clean and had a young vibe, especially in some of the bars we drank in. We were only in Luxembourg for the one night and we both loved it, it felt very weird that everyone spoke such good English especially as where we live in France you would never get served if you spoke in English ... which is how it should be, but it was a strange feeling none the less. We would both like to go back to Luxembourg and spend some more time there as we didn't really get to see much of this lovely place.

Luxembourg Photos

Luxembourg Travelogue

© Richard Randall

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