I am afraid that I am going to write my second scattered email in three days, as, while I took notes today, I have forgotten some of the things that I wanted to say and did not manage to write down, and I am a little tired. I woke up having slept poorly yet again despite having aired the room out nicely before going to bed and having left the window ajar all night long; I am not sure what the problem is. It is possible that my having reverted to being a bit of a night owl over the past several days has disrupted my sleep patterns, while it is also possible that sleeping poorly and dozing off during the day causes one to sleep poorly again, prolonging the cycle. Whatever the case, I felt like a sack full of cement when I woke up, so I lay in bed for awhile, unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep, and finally got up when I decided that I had to start doing something.
I got the train station later than I had been planning to do and therefore left for Luxembourg later than I had expected; I had assumed that a train departed for Luxembourg every hour, but there turned out to be a two-hour break between the 10:22 (or thereabouts) train and the one that I took at 12:22. I sat down to read and forgot to look at that church that I mentioned the other day. I paid little attention to the landscape as I rode the train, as, while there densely-wooded hills and large rivers (or one winding river) near Nancy, there is little else to look at through the window. One sees some attractive churches through the window, like in Germany, and some of the villages that one sees climb up the hills, which is a nice effect, but the areas near the train tracks in France tend to be extremely banal, unlike those in Germany. They are often cluttered with junk that must be used for manual labor or walled in on both sides by factories. The fact that French regional trains are very fast might also detract from the experience of looking out of the window, as it clearly makes getting to one's destination much more the point of going there than enjoying the ride itself.
Luxembourg turned out to be a fairly normal (albeit affluent) city attached to a fascinating historical area. When I got off of the train, I was disappointed not to have been cast into a fairy tale, just as I was disappointed when I first visited Europe; I had to ask a couple of locals how to get to the historical section of town, as, just like any non-German city, Luxembourg had no useful tourist information. I started walking according to the directions of the people with whom I had talked and soon found myself in a fairly small neighborhood of buildings overlooking a part of town located in a gully: Luxembourg is a city built along a series of ravines. The city had a lot of placards, most of which I had the misfortune of not bothering to read, and its bridges overlooked great swaths of forests, making for picturesque shots of old churches and government buildings against a seemingly-untamed background. It has an old castle, the placards of which explained that Luxembourg was created as a buffer between France and Germany, and it has many buildings relating to law and government, showing the centrality of those institutions to Luxembourg(ian?) culture. That more or less sums up my impressions of the city (and country): while the views from the top of the ravines were gorgeous, it did not look like there would be much to do down below, discouraging one from descending to the older sections of town. After an hour-and-a-half or two hours in the city, I felt the most terrifying of all feelings for a tourist - boredom! I found an unexpected way out of my boredom, which I will relate a little later below.
I have a giant number of scarcely-related impressions that I should relate to you before moving on to today's main story. The first of these is that Frenchmen clean up after their dogs much less reliably than Germans; perhaps the fines for not doing so are too small to motivate dog-owners or are too leniently-enforced to matter. I have so far found the French very polite and generally cheerful, excusing themselves when they get in one's way and thanking one for holding the door for them. The only exceptions to this rule, beside one or two of the railway personnel, have been a Frenchman with whom I collided the other day as I rubbernecked the scenery around me and a Frenchman who answered me in English despite my speaking passable French, as if to say, "Your French isn't good enough to warrant your hearing my French" - it was the traditional Parisian treatment, which is, evidently, present to some degree in every city (I also got it once in Colmar.). While the Frenchman with whom I collided looked at me angrily, as though it were my fault that we had run into each other (it mostly was; I have very poor peripheral vision due to my fit-over sunglasses), most other people - the ones who do not look like criminals - have appeared affable, and they take well to compliments about their dogs.
I have discovered that the easy way to eat French food without paying too much for it is to go, like to the beerhouses in Germany, to cafes. One has to choose these carefully, just as one has to choose between beerhouses, but if one picks well, one can eat enough good French food to fill one up for 10 Euros, including a tip. (It would not make sense to do this more than once per day.) Yesterday, I had some sort of fish with ratatouille, while today, at the same café as yesterday, I had the best quiche of my life, a green salad, and a real French crepe for 8.50 Euros. The quiche was made so fluffily that the egg part was almost like softened cream cheese, and, while I am not a big fan of quiche, I had to admit that it was objectively better than any other than I had tasted. The "green salad" was exactly as advertised: it was green. It consisted of lettuce doused in vinaigrette. While the crepe was good, it was no better, surprisingly, than the pancakes that Russians make. I am sure that there is not a single chef in Russia who can make any French dish as well as the average cook in French café, yet Russians make crepes, a supposed specialty of France, just as well as the French themselves - go figure. I still have not tried any French pastries (except for a croissant about a week ago), as they are much worse and more expensive than German pastries.
I think that I had a few other things to say about the past few days. French trains are air-conditioned, interestingly; they are very high-tech. French ticket collectors, on the other hand - that is the name that I have given the people who come to verify one's tickets - are the worse-dressed that I have ever seen. The first time one came up to me, on the train from Strasbourg to Nancy, I assumed that he was a beggar when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, as he was dressed seemingly at random, was hovering over my shoulder, and appeared to want something from me. I tried to ignore him, pretending that I had not seen him, until he asked pointedly for my ticket, which I showed to him, suspiciously. Over the past few days, I have seen several other atrociously-dressed ticket collectors, who do not appear to have any uniform whatsoever. That is what bothers me about this whole thing - not that the ticket collectors are supposed to be dressed like the conductors of orchestras, but that they should have a standardized uniform and very obviously appear to be on the job; one should be able to pick them out from a mile away. The fact that they look just like any other passenger on the train makes it very difficult to trust one; they could just as easily be imposters who want to steal one's ticket and run away as they could be employees of the railway system.
One of my final two points is that, while I enjoy the privacy that a room of my own affords me, it turns out, interestingly, that it is not really necessary for one to have one's own room while travelling. I might be saying this because I have only been travelling for 23 days, and I might be saying it because I have gotten lucky (since Cologne) with my roommates, but it seems to me that one gets so used to being surrounded by people that one writes and sleeps just as well in shared rooms as in single ones. I have no more trouble showering or making lunch in a shared room than in a single one, and I take my valuables with me when I leave the hotel despite having my own room, meaning that the (theoretically) increased security of having one's own room is of little use. The only thing that I have done here that I cannot do in a shared room is to exercise a little (I brought a couple of resistance bands with me), but I have only done that once, and I found time to do it in a few of my shared rooms anyway. There are no more outlets here than in a shared room (that is, access to them is not any better; shared rooms tend to have plenty), and, while the bathroom facilities at a few of my hostels have been inadequate, any reasonable hostel will give one the same access to a bathroom that one can get in a single room. My only other observation, which is short enough that I can tack it on here, is that there must be a serious difference between churches that have one steeple and churches that have two, though I cannot for the life of me tell you what it is (except that they represent different systems of belief).
Oops. I forgot to tell you that the last few days have gotten progressively colder and that there were even brief showers in Luxembourg. I have never been so happy to be cold as I can remember. While I was not cold for long today, as it was warm enough, for periods, for one to wear a tee-shirt, I was cold enough to remember that one is not always a walking torrent of sweat. By contrast, it was so hot in Freiburg that I took my glasses off for dinner on my first evening there, as I was sweating so profusely that I wanted to freedom to wipe sweat from my face onto my shirt sleeves every minute. I recognize that reports about the weather probably are not too interesting to people back home, but changes in weather make a giant difference to the traveler himself. My advice to you is to stick to Northern Europe as much as possible in your travels (which is more or less impossible, as there is too much interesting stuff in the south) and not to travel for any reason whatsoever in August. The heat here is brutal enough as is in June; I would not want to experience it at its worst.
My most interesting tale of the day started in Frankfurt, when I stepped in to an Asian grocery market and found mochi cakes for $2. I should have bought them right then and there, but, looking at their calorie count, I decided against it (and almost surely went on to eat something even more caloric). I decided to get some for the train ride the next day, but when I passed by the store in the morning, I discovered that it was not a real Chinese store - it was not open on Sunday. I left, disappointed, and decided that I would have to satisfy my craving for mochi cakes at some other time.
My next venture into a Chinese store also proved that it was fake, as everything there was over-priced. This was just a couple of days ago, in Nancy, where I had the pleasure of seeing a woman wearing shoes with soles that were four or five inches thick and had white-and-black zebra stripes on them. I did not buy anything, alas, as I refused on principle to overpay for food in an Asian market. I figured that I could find an actual Asian market one of these days and buy some Asian food, which I did not realize that I missed.
When I stumbled upon an Asian market near a church today in Luxembourg, I was not hopeful that it would be any good, as experience had sapped my enthusiasm, but I decided to step inside and take a look around, having learned to walk around stores without feeling obligated to buy anything. The store was super-heated, as though it were the heart of winter, and had poor pickings. The fruit out front appeared to be rotting; its shelves barely reached one's waist; and its range of merchandise was limited. When I got to the mochi cakes, I thought to take them to the cashier and ask for their price, because I could not see it at first, but then I saw it listed below them: 3 Euros. This will not mean anything until I put it in perspective. I was being asked to pay 3 Euros for 6 mochi cakes weighing a total of 200 grams. Fearing that they would continue to get more and more expensive with each new city that I saw and that I would eventually break down and pay 10 Euros for one mochi cake out of desperation, I left the store, resolving not to buy any Asian food until I reached Vancouver.
That would seem to be the end of this story, but at around 3:00, when I started to feel bored, I also started dying of starvation. I had been planning to sample Luxembourgian food, having brought enough lunch to last most, but not all, of the day, and really wanted to buy something for 2 or 3 Euros that would tide me over. I realized that the mochi cakes would have fit the task perfectly, as they are dense and often more filling than they appear, but I could not remember where I had found the Chinese store. I knew only that I had walked right to the end of some road or other and found it near the corner of a crossroad. I decided that the chances of my finding the store were low, and I set out to find anything cheap in the whole city of Luxembourg.
My task proved difficult, as, besides incredibly-expensive restaurants, Luxembourg did not appear to have any establishments for eating of any kind. I walked past various stores that were closed, probably in connection with the national holiday that someone had mentioned to me (and that explained all of the live music being played) and a ton of hotels, where everyone else was probably eating. When I finally came to a Turkish doner place and discovered that I could get a bulky-looking wrap for only 4 Euros, I gave in. I decided to eat there, as it was going to be no more expensive than taking my food to go, and, when I mentioned to the shopkeeper, at his prompting, that I was from Canada, a nearby man perked up and said that he had recently been there. We ended up falling into conversation, and he told me that he was from the Netherlands but was working a dream job as a professor of civil engineering at the University of Luxembourg. The man was supercilious but fascinating, and I ended up wiling away some time with him as we talked about travelling and world culture and he showed me photos of mountaineering trips that he had taken. That was how I ended up spending the time between starting to feel bored and going back to the train station to read for awhile (I like to be early for trains.) before returning to Nancy.
That was not all, though. As I was walking back to the train station, I remembered that I had seen the Chinese market early in the day, when I went off of the main road to the train station to look at a nearby church. I went back that way, went back into the store, and decided to buy the mochi cakes after all. There was not any real justification for this decision except that I would have to buy something for the train ride (as I only had enough food left for half of a lunch) and that I had a craving for Japanese food. Someone in one of my hostels mentioned having a craving for sushi, which was incomprehensible to me, as one has sushi stuffed down one's throat 365 days a year (or, more accurately, every time one goes out with young people) in Vancouver, but I came to understand this person's feeling when I realized that I missed Japanese deserts. (Oddly, I do not miss dim sum. I suppose that one does not have to have it often to enjoy it.) I also bought something called pineapple cake that appeared to be of shortbread-like consistency - I am sure that it contains negative amounts of sugar and fat, and it will be easily portable and not spoil. I will offset these dietary choices with a sandwich made out of my remaining groceries and some sort of fruit juice that I bought that has vitamins coming out the wazoo. (Also, I have been eating mixed vegetables with a glass of milk on the side for breakfast, which might be influencing my choices during the day).
That more or less sums things up for now, as I am fond of saying. Tomorrow will be mostly a travel day. I regret that I do not have more time for France, as I would like to see the south of the country as soon as possible, but it was not fated that I do so in the immediate future. I hope that the Roman ruins that have help up for two millennia there last for another two years so that I get a chance to see them in the summer of 2015.
I got the train station later than I had been planning to do and therefore left for Luxembourg later than I had expected; I had assumed that a train departed for Luxembourg every hour, but there turned out to be a two-hour break between the 10:22 (or thereabouts) train and the one that I took at 12:22. I sat down to read and forgot to look at that church that I mentioned the other day. I paid little attention to the landscape as I rode the train, as, while there densely-wooded hills and large rivers (or one winding river) near Nancy, there is little else to look at through the window. One sees some attractive churches through the window, like in Germany, and some of the villages that one sees climb up the hills, which is a nice effect, but the areas near the train tracks in France tend to be extremely banal, unlike those in Germany. They are often cluttered with junk that must be used for manual labor or walled in on both sides by factories. The fact that French regional trains are very fast might also detract from the experience of looking out of the window, as it clearly makes getting to one's destination much more the point of going there than enjoying the ride itself.
Luxembourg turned out to be a fairly normal (albeit affluent) city attached to a fascinating historical area. When I got off of the train, I was disappointed not to have been cast into a fairy tale, just as I was disappointed when I first visited Europe; I had to ask a couple of locals how to get to the historical section of town, as, just like any non-German city, Luxembourg had no useful tourist information. I started walking according to the directions of the people with whom I had talked and soon found myself in a fairly small neighborhood of buildings overlooking a part of town located in a gully: Luxembourg is a city built along a series of ravines. The city had a lot of placards, most of which I had the misfortune of not bothering to read, and its bridges overlooked great swaths of forests, making for picturesque shots of old churches and government buildings against a seemingly-untamed background. It has an old castle, the placards of which explained that Luxembourg was created as a buffer between France and Germany, and it has many buildings relating to law and government, showing the centrality of those institutions to Luxembourg(ian?) culture. That more or less sums up my impressions of the city (and country): while the views from the top of the ravines were gorgeous, it did not look like there would be much to do down below, discouraging one from descending to the older sections of town. After an hour-and-a-half or two hours in the city, I felt the most terrifying of all feelings for a tourist - boredom! I found an unexpected way out of my boredom, which I will relate a little later below.
I have a giant number of scarcely-related impressions that I should relate to you before moving on to today's main story. The first of these is that Frenchmen clean up after their dogs much less reliably than Germans; perhaps the fines for not doing so are too small to motivate dog-owners or are too leniently-enforced to matter. I have so far found the French very polite and generally cheerful, excusing themselves when they get in one's way and thanking one for holding the door for them. The only exceptions to this rule, beside one or two of the railway personnel, have been a Frenchman with whom I collided the other day as I rubbernecked the scenery around me and a Frenchman who answered me in English despite my speaking passable French, as if to say, "Your French isn't good enough to warrant your hearing my French" - it was the traditional Parisian treatment, which is, evidently, present to some degree in every city (I also got it once in Colmar.). While the Frenchman with whom I collided looked at me angrily, as though it were my fault that we had run into each other (it mostly was; I have very poor peripheral vision due to my fit-over sunglasses), most other people - the ones who do not look like criminals - have appeared affable, and they take well to compliments about their dogs.
I have discovered that the easy way to eat French food without paying too much for it is to go, like to the beerhouses in Germany, to cafes. One has to choose these carefully, just as one has to choose between beerhouses, but if one picks well, one can eat enough good French food to fill one up for 10 Euros, including a tip. (It would not make sense to do this more than once per day.) Yesterday, I had some sort of fish with ratatouille, while today, at the same café as yesterday, I had the best quiche of my life, a green salad, and a real French crepe for 8.50 Euros. The quiche was made so fluffily that the egg part was almost like softened cream cheese, and, while I am not a big fan of quiche, I had to admit that it was objectively better than any other than I had tasted. The "green salad" was exactly as advertised: it was green. It consisted of lettuce doused in vinaigrette. While the crepe was good, it was no better, surprisingly, than the pancakes that Russians make. I am sure that there is not a single chef in Russia who can make any French dish as well as the average cook in French café, yet Russians make crepes, a supposed specialty of France, just as well as the French themselves - go figure. I still have not tried any French pastries (except for a croissant about a week ago), as they are much worse and more expensive than German pastries.
I think that I had a few other things to say about the past few days. French trains are air-conditioned, interestingly; they are very high-tech. French ticket collectors, on the other hand - that is the name that I have given the people who come to verify one's tickets - are the worse-dressed that I have ever seen. The first time one came up to me, on the train from Strasbourg to Nancy, I assumed that he was a beggar when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, as he was dressed seemingly at random, was hovering over my shoulder, and appeared to want something from me. I tried to ignore him, pretending that I had not seen him, until he asked pointedly for my ticket, which I showed to him, suspiciously. Over the past few days, I have seen several other atrociously-dressed ticket collectors, who do not appear to have any uniform whatsoever. That is what bothers me about this whole thing - not that the ticket collectors are supposed to be dressed like the conductors of orchestras, but that they should have a standardized uniform and very obviously appear to be on the job; one should be able to pick them out from a mile away. The fact that they look just like any other passenger on the train makes it very difficult to trust one; they could just as easily be imposters who want to steal one's ticket and run away as they could be employees of the railway system.
One of my final two points is that, while I enjoy the privacy that a room of my own affords me, it turns out, interestingly, that it is not really necessary for one to have one's own room while travelling. I might be saying this because I have only been travelling for 23 days, and I might be saying it because I have gotten lucky (since Cologne) with my roommates, but it seems to me that one gets so used to being surrounded by people that one writes and sleeps just as well in shared rooms as in single ones. I have no more trouble showering or making lunch in a shared room than in a single one, and I take my valuables with me when I leave the hotel despite having my own room, meaning that the (theoretically) increased security of having one's own room is of little use. The only thing that I have done here that I cannot do in a shared room is to exercise a little (I brought a couple of resistance bands with me), but I have only done that once, and I found time to do it in a few of my shared rooms anyway. There are no more outlets here than in a shared room (that is, access to them is not any better; shared rooms tend to have plenty), and, while the bathroom facilities at a few of my hostels have been inadequate, any reasonable hostel will give one the same access to a bathroom that one can get in a single room. My only other observation, which is short enough that I can tack it on here, is that there must be a serious difference between churches that have one steeple and churches that have two, though I cannot for the life of me tell you what it is (except that they represent different systems of belief).
Oops. I forgot to tell you that the last few days have gotten progressively colder and that there were even brief showers in Luxembourg. I have never been so happy to be cold as I can remember. While I was not cold for long today, as it was warm enough, for periods, for one to wear a tee-shirt, I was cold enough to remember that one is not always a walking torrent of sweat. By contrast, it was so hot in Freiburg that I took my glasses off for dinner on my first evening there, as I was sweating so profusely that I wanted to freedom to wipe sweat from my face onto my shirt sleeves every minute. I recognize that reports about the weather probably are not too interesting to people back home, but changes in weather make a giant difference to the traveler himself. My advice to you is to stick to Northern Europe as much as possible in your travels (which is more or less impossible, as there is too much interesting stuff in the south) and not to travel for any reason whatsoever in August. The heat here is brutal enough as is in June; I would not want to experience it at its worst.
My most interesting tale of the day started in Frankfurt, when I stepped in to an Asian grocery market and found mochi cakes for $2. I should have bought them right then and there, but, looking at their calorie count, I decided against it (and almost surely went on to eat something even more caloric). I decided to get some for the train ride the next day, but when I passed by the store in the morning, I discovered that it was not a real Chinese store - it was not open on Sunday. I left, disappointed, and decided that I would have to satisfy my craving for mochi cakes at some other time.
My next venture into a Chinese store also proved that it was fake, as everything there was over-priced. This was just a couple of days ago, in Nancy, where I had the pleasure of seeing a woman wearing shoes with soles that were four or five inches thick and had white-and-black zebra stripes on them. I did not buy anything, alas, as I refused on principle to overpay for food in an Asian market. I figured that I could find an actual Asian market one of these days and buy some Asian food, which I did not realize that I missed.
When I stumbled upon an Asian market near a church today in Luxembourg, I was not hopeful that it would be any good, as experience had sapped my enthusiasm, but I decided to step inside and take a look around, having learned to walk around stores without feeling obligated to buy anything. The store was super-heated, as though it were the heart of winter, and had poor pickings. The fruit out front appeared to be rotting; its shelves barely reached one's waist; and its range of merchandise was limited. When I got to the mochi cakes, I thought to take them to the cashier and ask for their price, because I could not see it at first, but then I saw it listed below them: 3 Euros. This will not mean anything until I put it in perspective. I was being asked to pay 3 Euros for 6 mochi cakes weighing a total of 200 grams. Fearing that they would continue to get more and more expensive with each new city that I saw and that I would eventually break down and pay 10 Euros for one mochi cake out of desperation, I left the store, resolving not to buy any Asian food until I reached Vancouver.
That would seem to be the end of this story, but at around 3:00, when I started to feel bored, I also started dying of starvation. I had been planning to sample Luxembourgian food, having brought enough lunch to last most, but not all, of the day, and really wanted to buy something for 2 or 3 Euros that would tide me over. I realized that the mochi cakes would have fit the task perfectly, as they are dense and often more filling than they appear, but I could not remember where I had found the Chinese store. I knew only that I had walked right to the end of some road or other and found it near the corner of a crossroad. I decided that the chances of my finding the store were low, and I set out to find anything cheap in the whole city of Luxembourg.
My task proved difficult, as, besides incredibly-expensive restaurants, Luxembourg did not appear to have any establishments for eating of any kind. I walked past various stores that were closed, probably in connection with the national holiday that someone had mentioned to me (and that explained all of the live music being played) and a ton of hotels, where everyone else was probably eating. When I finally came to a Turkish doner place and discovered that I could get a bulky-looking wrap for only 4 Euros, I gave in. I decided to eat there, as it was going to be no more expensive than taking my food to go, and, when I mentioned to the shopkeeper, at his prompting, that I was from Canada, a nearby man perked up and said that he had recently been there. We ended up falling into conversation, and he told me that he was from the Netherlands but was working a dream job as a professor of civil engineering at the University of Luxembourg. The man was supercilious but fascinating, and I ended up wiling away some time with him as we talked about travelling and world culture and he showed me photos of mountaineering trips that he had taken. That was how I ended up spending the time between starting to feel bored and going back to the train station to read for awhile (I like to be early for trains.) before returning to Nancy.
That was not all, though. As I was walking back to the train station, I remembered that I had seen the Chinese market early in the day, when I went off of the main road to the train station to look at a nearby church. I went back that way, went back into the store, and decided to buy the mochi cakes after all. There was not any real justification for this decision except that I would have to buy something for the train ride (as I only had enough food left for half of a lunch) and that I had a craving for Japanese food. Someone in one of my hostels mentioned having a craving for sushi, which was incomprehensible to me, as one has sushi stuffed down one's throat 365 days a year (or, more accurately, every time one goes out with young people) in Vancouver, but I came to understand this person's feeling when I realized that I missed Japanese deserts. (Oddly, I do not miss dim sum. I suppose that one does not have to have it often to enjoy it.) I also bought something called pineapple cake that appeared to be of shortbread-like consistency - I am sure that it contains negative amounts of sugar and fat, and it will be easily portable and not spoil. I will offset these dietary choices with a sandwich made out of my remaining groceries and some sort of fruit juice that I bought that has vitamins coming out the wazoo. (Also, I have been eating mixed vegetables with a glass of milk on the side for breakfast, which might be influencing my choices during the day).
That more or less sums things up for now, as I am fond of saying. Tomorrow will be mostly a travel day. I regret that I do not have more time for France, as I would like to see the south of the country as soon as possible, but it was not fated that I do so in the immediate future. I hope that the Roman ruins that have help up for two millennia there last for another two years so that I get a chance to see them in the summer of 2015.
Goodbye for now!
Governmental buildings set against trees.
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