I'm afraid that with the amount of events that have been happening in my life this winter, I'll always be behind with my blog, but I still believe I'll catch up one day - perhaps when the new semester begins! ;) Today I'd like to tell you about my favourite Western European countries (out of those that I've been to, of course!): Luxembourg.
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| Esch-sur-Sûre |
You may ask: why exactly Luxembourg? It's not a very famous country. But I've loved it since the first time I went there in 2005. That very first trip was only to the capital city (also named Luxembourg), but I could already feel that there was something special about this country, making it different than its neighbours. Perhaps it's due to it's small size and population (less than 550 thousands of people), which means it's not as urbanized as Belgium or the Netherlands. Contrary to quite a widespread misconception, Luxembourg isn't that small and it doesn't consist of just one city. There are many more small towns, villages and about 100 castles! I've already been to Luxembourg for several times, but there's always something new to see and I love it! I also like it that driving through Luxembourg is much more pleasant than through other West European countries: there are few motorways, so for most of the time your ride small roads with few cars and are able to watch wonderful landscapes. Luxembourg is a montanous country, even if the mountains are rather small and should probably be called hills. ;)
This time me and my dad went on a trip to three Luxembourgish towns with castles that we haven't been to before. Yet I should tell you that Luxembourgish towns are just like Luxembourgish mountains - some of them have less than 300 inhabitants! ;)
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| Me at Esch-sur-Sûre castle |
Our first stop was in Esch-sur-Sûre, a town with 314 inhabitants! And no, it's not a village. :) It's a real town with a real post office, which works... 1 hour a day! :D It's located at a beautiful meander of Sûre river and surrounded by hills. The 10th century castle stands on one of them. Nowadays it's a ruin (but I really love castle ruins!) and is open to visitors for free.
As you may have noticed, the name of the town is in French. But, in fact, the linguistic situation in Luxembourg is quite complicated. So complicated that even I can't fully understand it. ;) They have 1 national language: Luxembourgish (considered as a dialect of German by some linguists), and two official languages: French and German. Most of people (at least those, who were born in Luxembourg - there are also a lot of immigrants) speak Luxembourgish among each other, but it's mostly a spoken language. As for writing, they use French (higher class) or German (middle or lower class). At least that's what Wikipedia says. :D I could hear people speaking all 3 languages and I think that living in such a multilingual society is a big advantage!
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| Bourscheid castle |
Our next stop was in Bourscheid castle, which is a bit away from the town with the same name. The castle is also a ruin, but a really huge and well-preserved one. It was first mentioned in 1095, although it's believed to be older. Of course, the whole castle wasn't built at once - some parts of it come from the 18th century. In this castle we had to pay the entrance fee and got an audio guide in English... Which was so boring that we ended up just walking around the castle the way we wanted and pretending that we've listened to everything! ;) So perhaps we've skipped some historic details, but we have our own impressions and I think it matters more. Do you also get bored with audio guides? I usually read a bit about the place before going there and more after coming back. I always prefer to read than to listen. The biggest sightseeing torture I can think of was visiting one castle in Belgium a couple of years ago, in which we had both audio guide and a human guide and we were in a group, so we couldn't run away... ;) But that's a completely different story!
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| Me in Bourscheid. |
The last and biggest town that we've visited was Clervaux. It has more than 1000 inhabitants and a post office with normal working hours. There's also a castle, which is used both as the town hall and a museum, which unfortunately was closed. But we also went for a walk to the Clervaux abbey, which is located on a hill, so we had to fight our laziness a bit and could feel proud of ourselves. :)
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| Clervaux castle and church |
Last but not least, I went to a bookshop in Clervaux and got myself a philosophic magazine in German (I think they have about the same amount of books and magazines both in German and French, but almost nothing in Luxembourgish), because I wanted to start reading in this language, but didn't feel brave enough to buy a book. Yet when I started reading and realized that I could understand philosophic articles without a dictionary, I suddenly felt much better! :) I ended up buying some German books, but that was already in Belgium, so I'll tell you about it next time! :) And I really hope to come back to Luxembourg this year. There's still so much to see and experience in this tiny, yet amazing country!
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