Fun is like insurance. The older you get, the more it costs.
- Leon Redbone
I was figuring to take it easy today; the exertions of the weeks past were starting to catch up with me. I would have slept late, but that would have meant missing breakfast and that would have been a real loss. Up to now I hadn't had much luck with hotel "breakfasts"; the few times I'd tried them, they hadn't amounted to much for the price. But breakfast at the Bella Napoli in Luxembourg was something worth getting up for: two kinds of bread, as many as three kinds of fruit preserves, butter, honey, even some sort of potted sausage that at least wasn't the wurst I'd had. And I think with a few months' carefully supervised training, somebody there might have learned to make decent coffee; it was still lousy, but better than anything I'd had in France or Spain.
I climbed slowly back up out of the gorge and walked back across the bridge and wandered around, watching people, listening to them talk. The Luxembourgers speak a dialect of German called Lëtzebuergesch, incomprehensible to other German-speakers; the sounds are different (ja comes out sounding more like "yo") and there are a lot of French words mixed in. That is what they speak among themselves; but since nobody else speaks it, they also speak French or regular German, or, usually, both - there seems to be a preference for French, maybe because the Germans overran the country twice in the last century and behaved with their usual bastardliness.
Around Luxembourg Ville most people seem to speak at least some English, often very well; and just to confuse things farther, in the area around the bus station there is a considerable neighborhood of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Arabs. As I say, quite a cosmopolitan city....
And for those not satisfied with smartly dressed ladies, it was possible to see smartly undressed ladies at a number of establishments in the area near my hotel. At least that was what the signs and photos out front proclaimed.
Whether or not I made any personal investigations is a military secret.
And on that high and tasteful note let us take our leave of beautiful Luxembourg City and its fascinating citizens; and its majestic old ruins, of which there will be one less tomorrow morning when the train leaves for Brussels....
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