Preview Trip: Part 1

First thing's first:  I love it here and I'm excited!  Pete is relieved!

We arrived Sunday.   I should mention for all you potential visitors from the Portland area:  If you fly on Delta, the first flight is from PDX to Amsterdam and takes 9 hours.  The second flight to the Lux airport is 1 hour.

Lux Airport.  Bonus point if you know what "Moien" is.  Can you identify all the other languages?

Considering it's halfway across the world, I'd say it's a pretty easy trip!!!

about to land, maybe over Belgium?

Sunday was gorgeous and we wanted to stay awake, so we spent the day walking around the city to orient ourselves.  Pete assured me that a city tour "death march" would keep jet lag at bay.

Luxembourg City has a great contrast between really old and really new areas and buildings.  Like our hotel in Kirchberg:

Compared with the Grand Duke's Palace:

Although many European cities have this contrast, I think it's still somehow a strong distinguishing feature of Luxembourg City.

old (left/foreground) vs. new (right/background)

It's also a city with higher elevation sections and canyon-type sections down by the rivers.

One of the main things we set out to do on Sunday was find Pete's office building.  According to our map, the location was somewhere down here...

But we figured that had to be wrong.  It's Amazon we're talking about here.  Shouldn't it be one of those modern blueish-grayish-glass buildings up top in the distance on the right?

We decided to trust the map and go for it.  You can actually take an elevator to get down/up, but we walked the winding way down...

And sure enough, there it was, down a little cobblestone alley...

back side of building to the right of Pete

Yeah, we thought this was just about the coolest thing ever, as you can tell!

The line for the elevator back up was a a little long (and we didn't want to terrify other passengers with our uncontrollable grinning resulting from our recent discovery), so we decided to walk the bike path Pete might take to and from work.

Lovely!

Four hours from when we set off, we finally limped back to our hotel, ate a well-earned dinner, and crashed for the night.  Apartment hunting set to begin at 10am the next morning.

To be continued!