My first Lux visitor!

After all of my weekends away visiting friends and other European cities, it was finally my turn to host my first visitor to Luxembourg (first of many, I hope). The honor of this first visit fell to Timmy, my buddy who people might remember from previous trips as ‘The Rumble in London’ and ‘Relaxing in Amsterdam’. While I was very happy to host my first visitor, I was also unsure of what exactly to do and show as I am still not that familiar with all of ‘the spots’ here in Lux, and honestly there really are not many ‘spots’ to begin with. My only idea was to show one of the truly best parts of Lux…the location!

The plan was to have fun in Luxembourg on Friday night (this is us walking back from having fun, and Timmy is indeed quite strong):

Get up on Saturday and make the 25 minute drive just across the German border to Trier for a bit of breakfast.....

and some site seeing of what is a very cool town. I have heard Trier has great shopping and amazing Christmas markets, but it didn’t realize its history. It is actually Germany’s oldest city, and was founded by the Romans in 16 BC and served for a time as the western capital of the Roman Empire. As such, there were a lot of great Roman ruins to go with the charm of a smaller German town.

After spending the first part of the day in Germany, we drove back to Luxembourg so I could show Timmy around during the day and see a bit more of the city:

To cap off the weekend on Sunday, Timmy had the great idea to drive up to Bastogne, a town about 50km away in Belgium. BASTOGNE was a key town in the last great battle of WWII, The Battle of the Bulge. We did not know exactly what we would find there, but we were lucky to discover a cool museum and memorials, including a small monument to the 101st Airborne (of Band of Brothers fame), on a small one lane road between Bastogne and the tiny town of Foy. We even drove back along General Patton’s route through the Ardennes forest to liberate Bastogne from the German siege. Cool stuff.

To see the rest of my pictures, CLICK HERE.

Wow, what a great weekend. Partying in Luxembourg, seeing Roman ruins and a cool German town, and finally reliving some WWII history. I know Timmy and I enjoyed it, and I can’t wait for my next visitor. Cheers!

Planes, Trains and Automobiles....my trip to Amsterdam and Barcelona

So my European adventure continued on Friday, October 20th with an extremely fun and odd combination of a weekend trip to Amsterdam with Timmy and his friend from London (the Peacocke), followed directly by a trip to Barcelona for a 5 day work training. Two amazing and very different cities, with a lot of fun to be had at both!

My trip started on Friday with my first real extended train travel since coming to Europe. I took the train from Lux to Brussels and then up to Amsterdam. It was good that I was taking the train and not flying as I overslept and woke up only 1 hour before my train was leaving…but I made it on comfortably with a good 30 seconds to spare.

I got into Amsterdam a few hours before the rest of the crew, so I had a few minutes to settle in and get a few basics taken care of (and yes that is Dutch apple pie, who knew?):

And of course some canals…

And finally the full crew is assembled (Timmy, Peacocke, Ryan) and ready to rock Amsterdam and celebrate Timmy's birthday in style:

Amsterdam is definitely a very cool, very surreal city. As I really was only there for 1.5 days, I did not get to see too many of the sites…but we did go through the van Gogh museum (which was an intense experience) and we saw plenty of the Red Light district and a few other of the downtown spots. But I did get to experience Amsterdam, and I even had the pleasure of basically catching a guy picking my pocket. Good times.

I woke up early Sunday morning to take the train back to Brussels so I could catch my flight down to Barcelona. By Sunday afternoon I was sitting outside in 75 degree weather sipping on sangria (ah, the picture is from another time sipping on sangria in the sun, there were a few) on the roof of the 5 star hotel we were staying at (you can see the Sagrada Familia in the distance). Man, that is they way to spend an afternoon.

While I was stuck in classroom trainings during most of the days during the week I didn’t get to see as much of the city as I liked. But as we were staying right downtown I managed to get out some and do stuff like wonder down La Rambla street, which was full of vendors, cafes, street performers and people…all the way down to the port and Christopher Columbus:

Around to see the Arc de Triumf and a gorgeous palm tree lined park:

And of course to see several Antoni Gaudi buildings such as Casa Mila (see the rest of my pics for a few more examples):

And maybe the most impressive building I have seen so far, The Sagrada Familia (the Guadi cathedral that has been under construction since 1883, with current estimates saying there are still 30-40 years of construction remaining…there are currently only 8 of 18 planned towers completed!):

It is disappointing because there is no way my pictures could or did do these places justice. Barcelona is just full of these amazing buildings, a very whimsical combination of old Gothic architecture combined with these ‘modern’ creations that were done around the turn of the century. All in all, Barcelona seemed like a city that would be great to live in. Of course having a San Diego-esque climate with lots of good food and beautiful people will do that for a city.

Another highlight of the trip was the food. Everyone knows Spain is famous for tapas, and those were amazing (if not a tad repetitive after having massive amounts of tapas every night for 5 straight nights). But the highlight for me was the authentic paella. Yes, I think they are all smiling at me.

After all that I didn’t even talk about the insane nightlife in Barcelona or the unexpected visitor I had to my room when I was trying to pack up on Friday afternoon. Regardless I made it back safely to Brussels and then to complete the final leg of the journey I rented a car and pulled into Luxembourg at 2:00am on Saturday morning….and ended up getting the best night sleep I had in over a week.

Whew, what a great trip! To see the rest of my pictures click HERE.

Check back again soon because I had the privilege of hosting Timmy this past weekend as my first visitor to Luxembourg…and it goes without saying that Luxembourg proved to be much less violent than London. Cheers!