First Day of School

My first civics class was today!  My last Luxembourgish lesson before the test tomorrow was today ?! I will try to keep today’s post brief because I need to study.

Working

I started off at a leisurely pace, chatting with Joe on the phone for half an hour before getting out of bed. Then I went downstairs for breakfast and immediately went back upstairs and crawled under the blankets. I sat in my PJs and worked for a few hours on some […redacted…] features. And can I just say I don’t know why I don’t do that more often.  I have a desk, of course. But staying in bed to work was pretty nice. Anyway, I waited until I got hungry to go out, at which point I was starving because I had to get up, shower, etc., before walking half a mile to lunch. By the time I got there, it was close to 2 p.m.

Lunch

But, I needed to be extra hungry because I knew today’s lunch was going to be awesome. A cafe called Kaempff-Kohler downtown apparently makes quite a delicious raclette, and I am ready. As soon as I arrived at this cafe, I was in awe. The menu board outside has a cheese-pun song lyric, as well as everything on the entire menu being cheese. Including, and I love this, “Recipe of the day: Every day a new proposal around cheese”. So mysterious, but obviously also delicious. But no special of the day for me today. I’m here for the raclette. Now, traditionally, raclette is served by putting a half wheel of cheese (raclette cheese) under a heat source, melting the exposed flat half of the cheese. Then, that melted cheese is scraped off onto a plate of boiled potatoes, various pickled vegetables, and any number of bacon/meat products, mustards, etc. I had some in Prague last time we were there, from a street vendor.  It definitely left an impression.  Amazon has been trying to sell me a raclette maker for months now. And from what I surmise, raclette makers are to European households what fondue pots are to American households: a weird housewarming gift everyone gets but never uses. However, this restaurant is using their raclette machine today. 

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After surveying the menu, I walk inside. Boom!  I am overwhelmed by the aroma of cheese. Not even really in a good way. Like, it’s a small shop full of stinky cheese. But the place also just straight up sells cheese by the pound. And it looks like hundreds of cheeses are available. So, I take a seat near the window, and seriously, the utensils consist of a fork and a cheese knife.  That is how you know this place is not messing around. I order my raclette and a glass of wine and wait for the magic. 

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This is a fancy raclette, so instead of whole boiled potatoes, it’s more of a gratin, layers of sliced potatoes with layers of cheese and bacon and herbs. The portion was quite large for lunch of just solid cheese, but I’ve been training up for this over the last few days.  I think I can handle it. It was exactly what I was expecting. Warm, gooey melted cheese, salty bacon, potatoes to soak up the cheese oil and the bacon oil, and a puddle of oil. There is no way to go wrong with melted cheese. 

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Final Luxembourgish Lesson

I tried without luck to get a monthly bus pass, then walked back to my room. I passed by Place Guillaume II, and they are already setting up the Christmas markets. All of the town squares have these wooden huts set up in preparation for the Christmas Markets that don’t open until closer to the end of November. But then…. THIS square has a thing that I am pretty sure is going to be an ice rink. I ran up to the railing with a group of small children oogling the soon-to-be ice rink. Squeeeeee!

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I spent the next hour studying, preparing for my last lesson before the test. It didn’t really go well.  I am so stressed and there are so many things going on that my brain is not really holding on to Luxembourgish words at the moment.  I just need to relax a little and hope that works itself out. I usually test well…. At the end of our hour, she said she’d cross her fingers for me. She reminded me to smile (which I took to mean ‘bless your heart’). And she gave me a few last-minute tips on what they’re looking for. 

Civics Class

After that, I walked to the university nearby and found the room for my civics class. This was actually a fun and informative class about, not just the formalities of the government, but the philosophy of the way the government works and the way it should work. After a 2 hour lecture/powerpoint, here is what my brain retained. 

Luxembourg creates 533 kg of waste per person per year. This is apparently a lot of kilograms, as they rank second in Europe for producing the most waste (first place in this dubious category goes to Denmark). And they rank third in the world. This tiny place ranks 3rd in the entire world…. behind Denmark and (ah, dammit), the United States. We’re #1. Yay team. Roll damn tide? I dunno.  So that was interesting. 

We learned some of the human rights laws in the country and the cases that initiated them. The constitution apparently holds that gender equality is so important, it is in there twice. Which is why some of the case law we studied boggles the mind. Laws that state that, in the case of unwed parents, the child must take the last name of the father, and only the father. I don’t even know what they would do if the father was unknown. Then again, there are only 600k people here, and they do all seem to know each other. And they’ll soon know me, too, I suppose. Hi, everyone 😀 Practice safe sex!
The law now says that if a child is born to unwed parents, the parents can decide between themselves whether to use the mother’s last name, the father’s last name, or their last names hyphenated either direction. And if they have more children, all of their children must have the same last name. AND…. if they can’t decide between themselves, a judge puts those 4 options in a hat and draws one and that’s the one the baby gets assigned. HOLY cow you guys. This is amazing. 

There were other laws about nationality… like if a woman and a man are of different nationalities, the baby gets the father’s nationality. So women could not pass Luxembourgish nationality to their own children. Women = incubators and men = fathers seems pretty equal to me… or not. So they did change that law, along with several others regarding women and citizenshep.  Like women getting married, who were automatically conferred citizenship (by marriage) to a country that doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, who then get divorced and want to come back or reclaim their Luxembourgish nationality. And also a law where women were automatically given custody of children in the case of parental separation. This law is now changed so that men and women, even if they divorce, are still equally responsible for the child. Apparently the actual law stated something to the effect of men being irresponsible and not being able to care for a child. So that got thrown out. 

And finally, one that might be most interesting to my readers in capitalist dystopias places…. The laws here and in most of Europe regulate when stores of different types can be open. They regulate when sales can happen. They regulate a lot of things. So, a still debated and changing part of the law was challenged: A bakery petitioned the court, saying that it is discriminatory that they are only allowed to be open certain hours when petrol stations can have longer hours. They hold that, if people want to buy sandwiches at the bakery at 5 a.m., and the bakery wants to open, then they should be allowed. So the court had to decide 2 things: 1: are they actually similar in business?, and 2: is it discriminatory and is it allowed in the constitution? They, amazingly agreed that yes, a bakery and a petrol station are similar businesses. The bakery argued that they both sell food/sandwiches/snacks/etc. The only difference is that the petrol station sells petrol. (I, personally would argue, that petrol is essential to people who are on the road, while sandwiches are not, but I am not a European legal expert….yet). But then the second part is where it gets interesting. Because the people, like normal people, workers, argued that the constitution has a protection in place for family life. And workers can’t be working at 5 a.m. and still spend time with their children and take them to school and participate in their family life. So this is still undecided. But interesting. 

Caveat: I just got out of class. Some details might be slightly different because I didn’t take notes. And some parts of this could have been entirely made up by the teacher. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here today. I don’t know. I didn’t fact check whether any of it was actually true. But this is actually what happened over the course of my evening. 

Class ended a few minutes early and I walked back to my room, picked up a coupon for a free drink at the restaurant across the street, AlterEgo, and headed out for some Italian food.  Now, my plan was to have a heavy lunch so that I wouldn’t be starving by the time my class was over at 9 p.m. BUT, I may have overdone it a bit because I am still not hungry. 

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I had a glass of red vermouth, which is one of my favorite things. And I ordered a pasta dish that was on the menu as a simple spaghetti tossed in olive oil, garlic, herbs, and chili. The restaurant comes highly recommended. The chef apparently makes a new menu every month with Italian specialties from different regions of the country, using whatever is best and freshest at the moment. So I sipped my vermouth, took a bunch of silly selfies, and waited for my spaghetti. It was a reasonable portion. But I wasn’t even slightly hungry. I just knew the restaurant closed in 45 minutes so I needed to eat something before bed. What I didn’t know was that, instead of being tossed with a sprinkling of red chili flakes, this pasta had sliced fresh red Thai chilis.  Honestly, I don’t know that they were Thai, but they looked like the Thai peppers I’ve had. Maybe they were Fresno chilis. Maybe they were Italian. Maybe they were conceived in the pits of hell by DiabloIII himself because I thought I was going. to. die. I tried to discreetly push all the peppers to the side. I ordered a bottle of water. I added more cheese (they foolishly left a jar of parmesan on my table). But nothing helped. The chilis infiltrated every drop of olive oil, permeated every noodle. I got through about half of it before giving up. Not being hungry and forcing myself to eat spicy foods was a fun hobby for a few minutes. The waiter came by and asked if it wasn’t good.  I told him it was great. All of my peppers were hiding beneath a thin layer of noodles, disguising them at the bottom of the bowl. “You want a doggy bag?” he asked, being very sweet because I had only eaten half…. and told him it was very good. So now I have a bunch of oily peppers and some spicy noodles in my room in case I get hungry tonight.  Maybe if I need some adrenaline to keep me awake to study, I can resort to that.