Two days ago the three of us took a day trip to Luxembourg, and hit Trier on the way back. For those of you who don’t know, Luxembourg is a country located between Belgium, France and Germany. It has always been a strategic military point for most of Europe, even back in the Roman period.

Our day began early as we headed out taking a train to the Frankfurt Airport so Jens could rent a car from his work (Lufthansa) around 8am. From there Jens drove us all out to Luxembourg. Jens was going there to meet a friend so Robey and I spent a couple of hours hanging out in the main city of Luxembourg.

Robey in Luxembourg

As I said before, Luxembourg is surrounded by Germany, Belgium and France. It’s officially a Grand Duchy, and as you can probably surmise it might have once been much bigger. It was much bigger, however France, Belgium and Germany have taken major chunks out of the Grand Duchy over the years.

There is still a royal family, which if you’re buying postcards about half of your options are simply photos of them. I’m sure I made myself sound the typical tourist when I said in the giftshop “Why do I want to send my family pictures of random Luxembourg people?” Ah Rachael…your ignorance is showing!

Many people might think Luxembourg is simply this one city, the city of Luxembourg, however the country still owns part of the surrounding countryside. There are a variety of ruins and other interesting sites that would be interesting to visit, if you plan on staying in Luxembourg for a while. As I said before, it’s a very strategic military point, and therefore there are many ruins of old defense fortifications in the surrounding countryside.

However the most important part of Luxembourg is the interesting language mixture. As the Grand Duchy is surrounded by other countries, it naturally has several official languages. Those are German, French and Luxembourgish. This provided us with a lot of fun, as Robey and I went to a cafe for coffee while there.

The lady we ordered from was italian, who spoke almost no german and mostly french (as far as we could tell). So she brought over the german speaking woman of the shop (who had a very heavy french accent). She spoke German with us, and we were able to order. In the end after we paid, they started chatting with each other in English, making the whole thing seem a little ridiculous.

Luxembourg is also one of the richest nations of the world, one of the original founders of the precursor to the European Union, and in general a very interesting look at modern day Europe.