Hello again everyone! I’ve come to a bit of a sad
realization lately…that soon I’ll have to go back home…so to make most of this
time, one of my flat mates and I have made a bit more effort to explore Europe
before we head back home to the U.S. (Although she’ll be coming back to study
in Europe for one more semester…)
So our little trips started last weekend. While talking with
some friends I realized how cheap it is to go to Trier, Germany from
Luxembourg. I had recently been to Germany, where I stayed with one of my roommate's family, explored Koln, and visited Rita in Bonn. But my flat mate had never been to Germany and really wanted to go, and because Trier was so easy to get to we decided that’s where we would head off to first. So we got up
early on Saturday and headed into Luxembourg City to buy some train tickets.
And sure enough, it was pretty cheap! It was 7 Euro for round trip tickets and
we didn’t even have a set time when we had to use the tickets. That meant we
could come back whenever we felt fit (or at least in time to catch the train
home to Esch).
After buying the tickets we walked out to see when the next
train was leaving to the last stop in Luxembourg. And sure enough, there was
one leaving in 3 minutes! There is nothing like sprinting to the train when you’ve
only been awake for about an hour. A short train ride later, we were at the
last stop, Wasserbillig. From there we got on a bus that took us to the Trier
bus station. After wandering over a few streets we found Porta Negra, which is
so beautiful! After a round of pictures, we began scouting out the churches, my
flat mate has a thing for churches and I had no problem indulging her!
We then spent the day wondering around all the big tourist
attractions, and what was so cool is that they are all so close and within
walking distance. Then as we were walking we saw a guy ahead of us who turned
and waved. We’re in Germany though, so how could this be someone we knew? Sure
enough, it was an Erasmus student who had come back for the day to submit his
vote for the European elections. Go figure that we go to a different country
and see someone we knew. This world is seriously smaller than I ever thought
possible.
From there we decided it would be a nice time to get some
food. Well, us and everyone else. As we wandered around the streets, every
single restaurant with outdoor seating was full. And with it being such a
beautiful day, we really wanted to sit outside. Unfortunately for us, no matter
how hard we looked, we couldn’t find anything. We ended up going into a small café
where I tried schnitzel for the first time. It was pretty good! I did
accidently buy carbonated water instead of flat water though…Europeans really
love carbonation; but shaking my water bottle for a few minutes made it a
little easier on me.
After a few hours of shopping, and having spent a lot of
money, we decided it was time to head back to good old Luxembourg. When we
headed back to the bus station, we found it surrounded by about 30-40 police
officers and a small group of protestors, maybe 6 or 7 people in total. They were
holding up a banner and one was yelling something into a megaphone (sorry, it
was in German so all I could do was watch for craziness). Then he finished
yelling and began blasting the German national anthem, which just confused me
more. When I looked around behind them, I found a store that was called “U.S.
Army Store” so I can only assume it had something to do with that.
The next problem we faced was figuring out which bus to take
us home…because neither my flat mate nor I had really paid attention to the
number of the bus we took here. We tried reading the bus schedules, but we
still got nothing out of it. Eventually we went up the one of the bus station
workers and showed him our ticket. But he took a brief look, gave us an annoyed
look, and just kind of pointed us in a vague direction. Thank you. Eventually
though we found a bus driver who responded with “Moein” so we knew he had the
right guy. Shortly thereafter, we were headed back to Luxembourg. It was such a
nice day, but it was at that point that I remembered I have red hair and I didn’t
put on any sunscreen. That’s a rookie ginger mistake. That’s right everyone, I
got my first sunburn of the year! Thanks for the great day Trier!
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