One rainy Sunday in September, I started off my brief sojourn in the city of Luxembourg by flagrantly committing a misdemeanor—I rode the bus without buying a ticket. Truly, I tried to do the thing correctly, but I entirely failed to find a ticket machine. As I only had six hours in the city and I hardly wanted to spend my time searching, I decided to take a risk and hopped on the bus sans ticket. (Besides, if it is enormously difficult to find a sales location at the main train station, where there are certain to be many foreigners, this is a failure of the transport system, d’après moi. At least, this was my justification.)
However, no one arrested me for my brazen disregard for civil society, and after two stops, I arrived at Place Hamilius in the centre-ville. The city was grey from the rain quite cold, but I was delighted to be in Luxembourg, a place I visited purely to be able to say I have been there! I wandered around for a while over the picturesque cobblestones and along the gorge which divides the city. Except for the other Sunday morning tourists and an occasional bell toll, the city was entirely silent. I found myself in front of the city history museum; naturally, I went in, and thus passed the next two hours. Meandering from one exhibit to another, I learned the fable of the fairy-mermaid Mélusine (who reputedly married Count Siegfried back at the end of the first millennium AD, magically erected the castle of the Bock, and disappeared into the river of the gorge when her mermaid nature was discovered), studied dioramas of the expansion of the city, and admired many photos of the royal family…
After all that, I was starving, but I heard noise coming from the Place Guillame and was compelled to investigate. There, I found a Turkish cultural festival taking place and girls in the middle of dancing! After them, two boys in traditional costume—a long white shift belted at the waist and covered by black wool cloaks plus a very tall hat—danced as whirling dervishes! It was excellent and made up for having missed whirling dervishes in Istanbul, in my opinion…It so happened that the festival sold Turkish food, so I purchased five euros’ worth of deliciousness and called that lunch. As 37% of the country’s population are immigrants, according to the city history museum, I decided this was a very authentic thing to do (rather than search for whatever makes up traditional Luxembourgish cuisine).
Stomach appeased with one final bite of baklava, I followed the chemin de la Corniche along the edge of the old battlements built by Vauban, looking down at the gorge below and admiring the view. Luxembourg’s roofs are ubiquitously grey; I did not see a bit of red tile.
Then I came to the casemates du Bock, which are the old, still largely intact bunkers of the widely renowned former fortress. Luxembourg’s renowned fortifications were begun in the sixteenth century and expanded by Vauban and then Austrian military engineers later on, and the casemates encompassed 23 kilometers of tunnel at their peak. When Luxembourg declared perpetual neutrality in 1867, the fortress had to be dismantled, but about 17 kilometers of the casemates are still accessible, and they are amazing! You can wander about them at liberty—it was what the catacombs in Rome should have been like, only this was a military labyrinth rather than a religious burial ground. Low ceilings, large and small tunnels, arched openings onto the gorge, winding staircases, extra subterranean passages to be used to access other areas of the casemates if ever the main access was destroyed by an attack…I really wanted to be holding a lantern aloft. One bit had a bunch of small galleries which could have been exploded in order to make the Bock blow up, if needed. They really are ingenious. I kept muttering, “Fascinating!” and wishing Maddie was there to share in my amazement.
I walked back to the train station on my own two legs, having realized that it wasn’t far away at all, buying a bottle of water, a lovely pashmina, and a bit of marzipan along the way, and then it was back to Strasbourg…
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