Luxembourg

Hi everyone. Back again for my weekly update of things in Europe.This week we went to Luxembourg (small little country between Germany, France and Belgium). The train trip there was pretty long since we had to change trains alot and had many stopovers, but this let us explore some towns along the way. The first town was Strasbourg in France. It was a nice town, definately want to check it out a little more, maybe when i go to Paris.

 


Anyways, there was this 1 really cool store there. The whole store was a vending machine, so you could buy your groceries from it. Very weird. 


Towards the center of town was this huge catherdal. Looks really cool. Unfortunately, we couldn't explore inside because our train was going to leave. We had to run alot to catch our train, barely made it back in time. Hopefully i'll have more then an hour next time. 


The next stop over was in Metz, France (i didn't mark these locations in the map at the top cuz i was only there for a couple hours). Metz was not are touristy as Strasbourg was, but seemed like a typical quiet french town was arcs and old buildings and stuff like that. 


The stop overs in France and being in Luxembourg made me realize how bad my french as become (quite bad). Maybe i should touch up on it sometime. On a completely unrelated note, here's a random picture of Metz. 


We got to Luxembourg at around 3pm and started to explore the city. Luxembourg is really cool as the city was like a fortress. It's been invaded so many times that they had huge walls around the city (most were torn down with accordance to the London Treaty (i think it was when Neopolean was defeated and the borders of Europe were re-drawn). There are still a bunch of ruins that remain of the fortress structures. 


We decided to save museums for sunday (when everything else would be closed) and explore the town. The first place we came across was Our Lady's Cathedral. It was a pretty nice place, lots of stain glass and old church architecture. Pretty cool. 


After that we decided to check out some of the ruins. We didn't have too much time in Luxembourg so we couldn't see them all but some of them were neat. They mainly consisted of lookout towers and gates and things like that. We jumped over a few fences and stuff to get access to a few. Here are some pictures. The first one is called Vauban towers. 


I don't remember this one but had to jump over a fence or 2 and up and across some creeky stairs and bridges. 


 


Here's Henry at the bottom. 


Here's another structure called Hollow Tooth. 


We decided to go to our hostel afterward. Unfortunately i led the group to the wrong street. In my defence, the roads all have long long names, the map was small and the two places have 3 outta 4 words the same and in the same order. Luckily we got to a nice lookout point along the way. Here's the group. 


We even got to take a nice (but short) little hike. 


The hostel we were staying at was really nice. It resembled a hotel with huge front lobby, big rooms, magnetic key cards...ect. It was a Hostel International member so we needed the membership card but we managed to get in and get the member price without it :D. The food there was pretty cheap as we got a big slice of cheese cake for 1 euro. Also, they had a foosball table (my foosball adventures continue) 


Next we went to the house the Royal family lives at. (on a side note they sell weird postcards with group pictures of the family, but if you didn't know who they were, you'd be getting a picture of some random family, they are wearing normal clothes and everything). 


After some more walking around it started getting late so Henry and I got some food. Being adventureous, we tried rabbit and horse. The rabbit was very tender and moist and resembled chicken, and the horse was tougher and had less fat mixed in the meat. Was pretty good. The portions were pretty big.My plate was cover in rabbit meat and i had several smaller plates of the sides. It was a little expensive at 11 euros, but it was interesting. 


We met the owner of a chinese resturant earlier in the day (it was his grand openning) so we went in at night to have some food and talk. It was pretty neat, the people were very friendly. We had won ton soup and fried noodles. 


We only had a few hour on sunday, so we checked out the Luxembourg City Museum. It talked about the history of the city and why it was so fortified. Pretty neat. 


Afterwards we walked along the outer wall. We made our way back to the trainstation to went home. All in all, Luxembourg was pretty nice. There weren't many paid attractions but the scenery and ruins are very cool. Ok, that's all for now. Next week is a long weekend, so we're off to Budapest, Hungry. See you guys later. 


 


 


 

Vienna - updated

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the late post, been a little tired and sleepy lately.

Well, just came back from my trip to Vienna. It was pretty good, better then I expected. All the people there are very friendly and helpful, just like my guide book said. We left on thursday night on a night train to maximize our time there but the night train was pretty brutal. The train was broken up into compartments of 6 seats with very little room for everyone. They were also sealed off so it was really hot and stuffy and if you open the window its really noisy. Needless to say, we didn't too much sleep that night. We went a guy from Norway on the train and then meet him again at the hostel so we decided to check out some of the sites together.  


The first place we went to was Schloss Schonbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburg family (they pretty much ruled the world back in the day). This place was huge and extremely nice. It has a bunch of pretty cool themed rooms also. 


 


 


After touring the main house we went to the backyard. It was huge, like a park. Flowers and fountains everywhere. It must suck bein the gardenner here. 


 


 


In one corner of the yard was those cool mazes made from the bushes. It was a bit embarassing as it took us a while to navigate them (i think we did every wrong turn). O well, was cool. 


The last thing we did was go to an apple struddel making demonstration. It was pretty neat and tasted quiet good. It was cool how hte dough stretches so much. 


Once we were done with the palace, we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Fine Arts. It was pretty much like every other art place but the building was nice. 


 


It had some cool artifacts as well. Doesn't this look like a holy gernade? 


The last stop of the day was a Mozart/Strauss concert/opera/ballet. It was pretty good and the musicians and opera singers were really good. 


 


The next day, we decided to go to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Military History), but before we got there, we arrived at Schloss Belvedere, so we went to check it out. We never went inside since it was just an art museum, but the garden in the front was very nice. 


 


The military museum was pretty cool and very informative. It went really far back into the past and carried on up until WWII. 


 


 


 


They also had the car the Franz Ferdinand was in went he was assassinated (and sparked the WWI) 


After that, we went to Beethoven's apartment. There wasn't much to see there but was sorta neat. Mozart's apartment was really close also, but it was closed. 


After that we just walked around town looking at some old churches and monuments. We went out for dinner after to try some traditional Vienese food. 


 


 


 


 


 


On the last day, we went to the Hofburg, which was the summer residence of the Hapsburg family. It was huge, like a small town and we check out 3 museums there. The first was the Silberkammer, which was a collection of their silverware and stuff like that. There was so many gold and silver plates and utensils, was pretty neat. They also have a famous way of folding the napkin that only 2 people in the world know how to do, pretty neat. 


 


The other museums was the Sisi museum (Empress Elizabeth) and the royal apartments. Was a lot of history there and was sorta neat to see how all the palaces i've been to thus far are all connected by a relative.

After that, we went to the Naturhistorisches Museum (museum of natural history). They had a huge display of rocks, minerals and meteorites. They also had this huge collection of dead/stuff animals, looked like every species. 


 


 


To finish off the day we just explore along the river Danube. 


 


 


We caught the night train to go home at around 9. This time we were in normal seats and the air conditioning was on, so it was much more confortable and easier to sleep. We arrived home at around 7 and went straight to work. Was pretty good and saw a lot of things, so it was pretty cool.