My first weekend in Luxembourg with no jet lag. I spent my morning wandering a different area of town. I started by visiting the Alima grocery store. I needed a bottle of water to carry around with me, as I’m finding myself always thirsty. But I figure, since I’m here, maybe I’ll check out the market.
The market, similar to the Monop’ that I visited last time I was in the city, is quite small, more similar to a New York bodega than anything we would consider a supermarket. To find a giant market, you have to get pretty far outside of town. So I wandered the 4 or 5 aisles of the market, seeing if there was anything I just needed to have today. I thought maybe I’d find a nice lunch take-away option, but nothing jumped out at me. I strolled through the aisles, sometimes just wandering. Other times, seeing if any of my favorite German goods from 18 years ago were there (I found none). In the end, I walked out with just a bottle of water and a carton of peach nectar. There used to be this peach-banana nectar I would buy at the Lidl in Germany and it was just so delicious. Anyway, it was a nice, clean market. Lots of selection, but only one brand of each product. Tons of very delicious looking baked goods and cookies/snacks.
The streets of Belair 
Beautiful clock tower 
Park 
Cool fountain in the park 
Proof that I was at that fountain.
From there, I walked the area called Belair. It is one of the nicer neighborhoods. It is generally more of a residential neighborhood than commercial, so there are very few shops and restaurants. What shops are there are closed because it’s Saturday. I was frequently the only person walking the streets. There are a couple of churches and a huge clock tower in the middle of the area. It’s pretty and manicured and all of the houses seem incredibly large.
A glass of bubbly 
I decided to try to find some lunch, and wound up at a place called Pavillion. It is in the middle of a park, so I had the added pleasure of wandering through a large park with a playground and fountains and a lake before lunch. I have afternoon plans, so I wanted a light lunch. I opted for the appetizer portion of potato pancakes. The menu was in French, so it didn’t say Gromperekichelcher, but these are my first potato pancakes in Luxembourg, so they’ll have to do.
Gromperekichelcher – say it with me 
Eating ice cream in winter, like the Europeans 
Enjoying the gromperekichelcher 
Fountain and lake outside the restaurant, sun right behind me. 
Very artsy photos of my lunch with harsh shadows.
I also ordered a kir cremant, which is a kir royale with cremant instead of champagne. It was light and refreshing against the heavy fried potatoes. The potato pancakes were good. They are clearly made of shredded (not pureed) potatoes, and have some herbs mixed in. They were served with a nice applesauce and another sauce that was like an herb aioli. Maybe it’s this restaurant’s version of tartar sauce. I much preferred the herb sauce with the herbal flavor of the potato pancakes, but the applesauce paired better with the kir cremant. So I ate some of each.
After finishing my lunch, I had a scoop of cookies flavor ice cream and continued my walk. I made my way back home in time to drop off my goodies from the grocery store and get to the palace to meet up with my Luxembourgish teacher.
We met up and she showed me around the Old Town. We walked to the Bock and she showed me how to get back to the Gronn. We even took the Pfaffenthal elevator, which I will take again in the daylight and share some photos of. It’s a glass elevator on the North-ish side of town that goes down to Claussen, and has amazing views. Then we stopped at a cafe and had a couple of beers. She showed me where the local Luxembourgish people hang out and where I can hear more spoken Luxembourgish. My Luxembourgish language skills aren’t quite good enough to converse about everything that comes into my head and I often get frustrated and resort back to English. Not to mention, talking to your teacher is a little stressful because you’re trying to do everything correctly. However, she is very kind and made me feel much more at ease. By the end of the night, we were both kind of fluidly conversing between English and Luxembourgish, depending on the topic. She is definitely patient enough to try to make sense of what I’m saying and kind enough to help me out by lending me a word here and there when I get stuck. It was just really, really nice.
She then had to catch the bus home and so we said Äddi. I wasn’t quite ready to go home, but I wasn’t quite ready to eat dinner, having just finished a beer. So I walked around town. And I walked some more. I read the menu of every restaurant in the city of Luxembourg. I wasn’t hungry, so there was always nothing that sounded good. I started walking at 6:15 p.m. By the time I tried to go into my first restaurant, it was almost 8. I did a lot of walking. It was fun, but definitely starting to get cold. Now it’s prime time for eating at a restaurant, I have no reservation, and it’s Saturday night. I’m still not super hungry, but am having no luck finding somewhere with small-ish plates. The first place I tried was a bar, and they had avocado toast on the menu. But they had no places. So I walked around, looking at giant plates of pasta and huge portions of French food. The Charles-Sandwich shop was full. Even the Pizza Hut had no indoor seating, and I wanted to come in from the cold. Finally, across the square, I found a place called Le Square, which had some appetizer toasts that looked light and warm. I had a toast with goat cheese and honey and almonds, and it was nice and warm and not too filling. To go with it, I ordered a “Pink Piscine”, or Pink Swimming Pool, which was a rose wine with grapefruit juice, served in a huge goblet (hence, a swimming pool). It was ok. Not too sweet, not too bitter.
Grilled goat cheese and honey toast 
Ile Flotantt 
Today is the day I drink only pink things.
After dinner, I was still a bit hungry from all the walking, so I went straight for a dessert. This restaurant also had Ill Flotantt on the menu, so I ordered one. This one was another new take on the dessert, as it had no hard browned sugar, but rather a caramel sauce drizzled over the top. This most certainly did not give it the bitterness it needed to offset the sweet creme anglais. This one did also opt for sliced almonds, and at least this time, there were fewer of them and they weren’t burned to the point of being overly bitter. The meringue itself was actually still warm, meaning it had just been poached, which is kind of cool. Overall, B for effort, but definitely would recommend putting the hard caramelized sugar on it.
