A Day in Luxembourg

LUXEMBOURG

Prerona Ray Baruah

Last New Year’s, my parents and I embarked on a somewhat impromptu road trip from Heidelberg to Brussels at the behest of my lovely aunt, who wanted us to pay her a visit in the Belgian capital. Luxembourg is a short detour from the usual driving route.

The extremely tiny and exceedingly wealthy country of Luxembourg had been on my mind for quite some time owing to a Luxembourgish friend of mine, Constantine, a 20-year old who always gushed about his country and could speak 4 languages, namely, German, French, English and Luxembourgish, like most citizens of the country.

We drove for a few hours along the route dictated by our trustworthy GPS device and at some point, we veered from the autobahn into the countryside, through small towns and rolling vineyards.

Just as we crossed the border into Luxembourg, a town with a very familiar name greeted us – Schengen. Pardon our ignorance, but prior to that moment, we didn’t realize that the term ‘Schengen’ actually came from this small, quintessential European town in south-east Luxembourg, lined with vineyards and famous for its wine. It lies on the banks of the Moselle river, conveniently located in the border triangle of Luxembourg, Germany and France, making it the ideal place for signing the Schengen Agreement.

This historic agreement was signed aboard the boat “MS Princess Marie-Astrid” in June 1985 between Germany, France and the three Benelux Union countries, namely, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, to dismantle border guards and barriers between them. Today, the Schengen area encompasses 26 members countries across Europe, thanks to which we could drive surreptitiously across the border without even realising.

We made a short pitstop in this town of great political significance, parking our car near the European Museum of Schengen. 33 years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do so without the border guards upon us! Instead, we were greeted by a family of ducklings and their mother, flapping around lazily on the river bank.

We took a good long look at the ‘nation pillars’ with their bronze stars, each representing a member state of the Schengen agreement, and tried our best to read the innumerable plaques with historic facts and photographs arranged chronologically. Having filled our brains with this newfound information, we took to the road again in search of the capital city.

Luxembourg City gave us a hard time in terms of finding a parking spot, like most European cities.

While we drove around in circles, we crossed quite a few major banks of different countries, evidence of the finance industry being a major player in the country’s economy, much like Switzerland’s. In the last few years, Luxembourg has become the European hub for most banks as well as the European headquarters for Amazon, Skype and Paypal, owing to its long-term experience in the e-commerce domain.

It has the world’s second highest GDP per capita and funnily enough, everyone out on the street actually looked the part. They somehow oozed an aura of effortless affluence, with their pearl necklaces, perfectly coiffed hair and some with their shiny-furred, well-groomed dogs.

Stepping out from the heated car into the freezing cold on the ‘Boulevard Royal’, we sauntered into a nearby park simply because it looked nice and eventually came out onto one of

their main roads, ‘Rue Notre-Dame’, which like the name suggests, led us to the huge Cathedral of Notre Dame. We took a quick peek into the Cathedral from the entrance since a magnificent arch-bridge had caught our eye previously on our walk to the Notre-Dame and all three of us were equivocal about wanting to go see it.

The Adolphe bridge turned out to be one of the world’s largest stone-arch bridges, connecting ‘Boulevard Royal’ in the Old Town to the station quarters across the river Petrusse. The bridge alongwith the castle on the other side paints quite a fairytailish picture. We didn’t go across it because it seemed like a rather long walk and we were content with just looking down at the Petrusse Casemates located within the ‘Place de la Constitution’, a garden-like memorial for the Luxembourgers who died in World War II, symbolising the country’s freedom. Had the weather been warmer, we would’ve ambled down to the memorial but a cold, grey December day was not apt for it or for our hunger.

After some croissants and a stroll through the nearby Christmas market, we hurried back to our car to resume our journey to Brussels. We didn’t want to keep my sweet aunt waiting!