Stop! Relax, Outside the Box.

What do you do in a place where everything turns off at 8:30 at night? Just sit and ponder. Walk up some hills. Explore the façade of a city built up around rock forts and torn down mercilessly by crippling war. Oh, and maybe practice your French and marvel at the oddity of Luxembourgish. This, my friends, was my past few days. In the smallest country I have ever consciously visited (Singapore, in my infancy, only counts through home movies), I got to see the calmest metropolis ever. The streets were clean, people were on the whole friendly, and you could walk the city without a care in the world. Erich, Dionna and I, people of Chinese, Caribbean and Indian heritage, were stopped in front of a fountain to have a man take pictures of us with HIS camera. He then proceeded to tell us what places to visit. We figure it was because of our diversity that they had never seen before.

Despite being crammed by some of Europe’s most influential countries, Luxembourg is incredibly removed and all its own. Though Germany and France exhibit open-all-the-time stores with bustling nightlife, Luxembourg is the complete opposite; a veritable city that runs despite seemingly having more hours closed than open. I guess, however, this gives you time to slow down and find things that a crowd would normally push you through. In the Casemates, an underground fortress in the old city, we did an experiment with the diffraction of sound waves, managing to get audio to move coherently between two deep spiral staircases about 100 meters between each other. It was something we would not have thought of in a circumstance with visitors flooding through the claustrophobic caves.

In the far north of the country, in Clervaux (a grueling 52 minute train ride out from the City) we got to, practically alone, dissect one of the most controversial and acclaimed art exhibitions of all time, the Family of Man. We got to take the time to take an emotional journey to find ourselves and relate ourselves to these pictures outlining the elements of human life. It was incredibly rewarding to do this with no silhouettes drifting past eyesight.

The luxury of Luxembourg is its silence. Though there is a time to play and socialize en masse, there is also a time to be alone. In the ‘City’, we got to walk through, uninterrupted, the antiquated architecture and rich roads at day and night, just free to look about and keep our thoughts silent to the world, but loud within ourselves. I thoroughly appreciated it.

In other news, the World Cup begins in two days. Now that my intense relaxation has passed, it’s time to get psyched; I bought my Weltmeisterschaft 2010 exclusive magazine detailing all of the World Cup squads, groups and matches. It’s in German. My experience with that language is 6 weeks in 6^th grade, and a semester in Freshman year. Let’s do it. GET PUMPED!