16.
Luxembourg Again

Fun is like insurance. The older you get, the more it costs.
- Leon Redbone


Down in the gorge beneath the bridges there is a wonderful park with benches and fountains and big shady trees. A fine place to spend a peaceful Saturday morning, and that was where I went. It wasn't even raining; the sun actually tried to shine a couple of times.

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.


Our hero struggles to extract the cork from a half-full bottle of Moselle picked up yesterday in Trier. One thing I liked about Europe was that you could drink wine or beer in public places without getting hassled. And the wine was not only plentiful but cheap; in France I used to think that if I lived here permanently my liver would develop its own weather.


Here is something that struck me as rather neat: a church built into the rock wall of the gorge. I never did find out its history. It was closed off and obviously hadn't been used for a very long time.

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....


Saturday was market day and people were selling flowers and produce and foods in the public areas over in the old town; there was even a kind of fair or carnival area with tent restaurants and cafés and popcorn stands and win-a-stuffed-toy games and the like. An unbeatable scene for people-watching -


Okay, so maybe I was mostly watching one particular category of people. But who could help it? Luxembourg has many distinctions, but one in particular deserves to be better known: Luxembourg City has overall the finest-looking women of any place I've ever been.


I mean, they're all over the place, it's incredible...I don't know why it is; maybe walking up and down those steep hills keeps them in shape? Or maybe it's the combination of French and German genes? Whatever the cause, vive la results.


And specifically they've got the tightest butts and the greatest legs - and, judging from the incredibly tight pants so many of them wear, I'd say they know it. The national emblem of Luxembourg should be the visible panty line.


Look at that...it's not easy to get a VPL with jeans but a Luxembourg girl can do it.


True, some looks are more appealing than others. Fans of the group Cracker will understand what I mean when I say that I finally came to understand one of their best-known songs. (The rest of you can ask a Cracker fan.)

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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