Does that come with frites?

So here we are on a Sunday night in Luxembourg...snowbound. About two weeks ago, I told one of my new colleagues at work that I was hoping it would snow soon so Andy and I could take a drive to Bastogne a la Band of Brothers and check out the Ardennes where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. Angela, who grew up in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), tells me, "you are crazy, it hasn't snowed like that SINCE the Battle of the Bulge". Well, Angela, it appears that the unthinkable has happened. We are looking outside at 3 or 4 inches of snow, all which have fallen in the last few hours. We got a dusting yesterday, just enough to make everything look pretty. We sort of lazed around all day today until about 4:00 when we decided to go for a walk. Although it is about 0 degrees Celsius here, we decided to get outside for some fresh air and excercise. Literally, as soon as we set foot outside, it started snowing. I said to Andy, "it looks like this is sticking" to which we both said, "nah" and kept on going. Our normal loop is about 2 miles, takes about 45 minutes depending on how ambitious we are with our speed (generally not very). It was all fun and games and catching snowflakes on our tongues until we turned for home, when the snow gods unleashed their wrath and told the wind gods to start blowing directly into our faces. I think my cheeks are still red from the windburn. Andy looked like a polar bear by the time we made it back, completely covered in snow. It was fun, but COLD! That did not deter us from making a second trip back into the fray for a delicious dinner at the Indian restaurant, though. So anyway, Luxembourg is like Evansville, Indiana with snow -- it seems to pretty much shut down. Should make for an interesting commute in the morning. The Cantonites would probably not even blink at this piddly amount, but Evansville (and probably Cincinnati) would come to a screeching halt for at least a good part of the day. We shall see. We did witness the poor souls charged with clearing our driveway out there with what appeared to be one shovel and one squeegee. Again, we shall see how that fares in the morning.

So the main point of this blog was supposed to be last night's dinner, but we got all sidetracked with the white stuff. Shortly after we were engaged, the Ravas and McFarland families (work colleagues) gave us a gift certificate to a restaurant that everyone raves about, Le Fin Gourmand. I have been there once before with the two partners I work for, before Andy arrived in Lux. I must say, I greatly enjoyed it and was looking forward to going back with a few more French words in my vocabulary. So we called, made a reservation, and showed up at the appointed time. The dude at the front desk/bar had a little trouble finding the reservation under "Andrew" but finally said "okay" and pointed us to what seemed like a very nice woman who greeted us with menus in her hands and turned around and started walking to a table, so we followed. Logical, no? Then we realized we had followed her to another table of diners patiently waiting for the menus she then handed them. She turned to me and said, "sil vous plait?" which is the nice way of saying "what do you want and why are you following me?" Luckily, the first dude had watched all of this (along with all of the other people in the restaurant) and then pointed to the table with a nice "Reservee" sign on it that had been set aside for us. We sat down, our server arrived (same chick with the menus) and proceeded to take us through the 5-7 minute speech about the chef's suggestions of the day...in French. I picked up a few words here and there, but mostly we just nodded along politely until she went away to leave us with the menu. Afterwards, the exchange between us was, "did you get that? yeah, me either." So we set about figuring out what to order, Andy chose the "delices de l'hiver" as his entree (starter, not main course, trips me up every time) which ended up being four things -- a small salad, duck sausage soup, foie gras on toast, and some sort of mystery meatball/meatcube. He was confused at first when they brought him a spoon, but it all made sense when the duck sausage soup arrived. My entree was "raviolis frites de crabe royale" which after ordering, I hoped desperately the French word for "crab" was "crabe". Luckily, I was not disappointed. Both of our entrees were delicious, and left us eagerly anticipating our plats (main courses). Andy had entrecote de boeuf (beef tenderloin) in Switzerland and loved it, so he ordered that with Bearnaise sauce and I had escalope de veau a champignons sauce (something of veal with mushroom sauce). We were both pleased, but the entrees were definitely the winners of the night. We also enjoyed a bottle of wine, we have become enamored with French wine from the St. Emilion region, so that was the obvious choice from the wine list -- they served it in two of the most enormous wine glasses I have ever seen. I mean, I have seen red wine balloons before, but this was just ridiculous. Dessert followed, a dame blanche avec chocolat chaud (hot chocolate sundae) for Andy and a poire caramelised (caramelized pear) for me -- very, very tasty. Oh, I forgot to mention that the reason all of the Deloitters love this place is because of the frites. The frites (fries) here in Luxembourg are quite tasty, because they usually cut them fresh to order. We forgot to order them the first time, so we had to ask our server to add them when she brought our wine...she spoke about as much English as we speak French, but we managed to get the universal phrase between us..."would you like fries with that?" and "does that come with fries?" We tried to pay the bill with our credit card, but as the charge was only going to be 8 euro (after using the gift certificate), the guy running the bill was very confused as to what we wanted to do, so after a lot of hand waving and pointing, we ended up paying in cash. All was well. And tasty. A very successful engagement dinner, a few weeks after the fact. And a very good example of the adventures of every day life in the land of the French speaking.

A trip to Zermatt

Hi everyone!

We went on our first weekend trip last weekend to Zermatt, Switzerland. We had been there previously (on our first trip to Europe together in 2004), and it has long been a place we wanted to revisit. We left work a little early on Thursday afternoon and drove to Bern, where we caught the train to Zermatt. We drove for about 4 hours and were on the train for about 2 more. Getting over the Alps is not a quick feat, but the train is far better than driving it, which we did last time. We arrived in Zermatt at about 10:15 PM and took an elektrotaxi to Hotel Jagerhof. No cars are allowed in the town, but they do have these sort-of supercharged golf carts that zip around taking tourists galore here and there. We pretty much headed straight for bed after our long journey, but awoke early the next morning to watch the sunrise over the Matterhorn (okay, we woke up for about 2 minutes, snapped some pictures, and then went back to sleep).

We had a pretty low-key weekend, we wandered around the town, did some shopping, and took the ski lifts up to the top of Klein Matterhorn (Little Matterhorn) which is near the real Matterhorn for some sightseeing and pictures. We had nearly perfect weather, barely a cloud in the sky the entire weekend! Quite a change from Luxembourg, where the skies are pretty much always gray. I have posted some pictures to my Facebook page, but everyone should be able to see them. Here is the link:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2005826&l=19b80&id=1521004580

Basketball season is upon us, it is a little sad to think that neither of us will probably make it to a live basketball game this year, but then again, we just got back from the Alps so we will try not to whine too much. Go Hoosiers! And Muskies! And Blue Devils!

Taking Advantage of Sunshine

So last Sunday, we had a lazy start to the morning wit'th a casual trip to the Cactus for some groceries and some pastries for breakfast. We had our coffee, we ate our pastries, we put away the groceries, and then were just kind of muddling around. Andy suggested we go for a walk, Les replied with a whiny, "I don't want to go for a walk, I am tired and I just want to lay on the couch." We were supposed to go to the IKEA (not to shop, it is mercifully closed on Sundays) for manual transmission driving lessons for Les, and she was quite excited about them and wanted to lay on the couch for a while and get a good dose of CNN International until they started to repeat the same programming (about an hour) and then head to Belgium for the infamous driving education. Sounds glamorous, but it takes less time for us to get to the IKEA in Belgium than it does to the office during rush hour traffic. It was a gorgeous fall day, Andy pointed out that we shouldn't waste it, so Les begrudgingly agreed to a revised plan of a walk, lunch back at the apartment of Indian food leftovers from the night prior (God, the Indian food. That is a topic for another blog entry altogether!), and then off to the IKEA parking lot.

So we packed up the camera, a bottle of water (which will prove very wise in a little bit), and a bag of potato chips in case we got lost and needed sustenance whilst they sent out a search party for us, and we were off! Now, up to this point, several locations had been discussed, and in the spirit of excellent relationship communications, Les thought we were headed towards the woods behind the apartment, Andy thought we were headed to a historic part of the city overlooking the Grund (sort of a valley with a river and lots of really old pubs and shops and restaurants). Andy suggested they drive, which Les thought was odd since they were going for a walk, but didn't say anything and got in. When Andy started to turn one way instead of the direction of the woods, Les said, "Why are you going this way?" A confusing convo ensued, with Andy ended up turning around and heading for the woods, both parties insisting neither cared which way we went or what we did. So we drove about 100 meters (a football field) to the bottom of this hill where there is a bike path leading straight uphill to the woods behind our apartment with some bike trails and running paths. When we say straight uphill, think about another 100 meters of a 20% grade. No lie, it is really a 20% grade and there is a sign to prove it. We both were sucking wind. Luckily there is a bench at the top for the weary climbers to pass out on, we chugged some of the water and vowed to start exercising and running again, as clearly a few weeks of IKEA furniture assembly was not the cardio workout we were pretending it to be! We have both run marathons, remember, so this is quite an embarrassing display.

Once we had recovered and could speak again, we spent a few minutes admiring the view (one of the pictures attached is of our little neighborhood, Beggen, and one of the buildings in the front of the picture is our apartment) and then set off down a tree-lined path. If we haven't mentioned previously, sunshine is a rare event in Lux, and certainly one to be celebrated! It was a gorgeously crisp fall day, and while the trees were prettier a few weeks ago, they were nothing to sneeze at! We walked along a little bit, took some pictures, enjoyed the peace and quiet. Moving to Europe together when you are just dating makes you have some convos you probably wouldn't normally have, so while not officially engaged, we pretty well knew we were going to get married someday, so somewhere along the walk, Les realized, "Hmm...this might be a nice place/day/time to get engaged" and started to get a little excited/nervous/giddy/whatever. A few minutes later, nothing had happened, and Les was relaxing back into her normal state, and was secretly a bit relieved as she hadn't showered and was wearing Adidas pants and a fleece pullover. We agreed to head back to the car for the rest of the day of Indian food and driving lessons, when things went awry. At this point, we cease the joint telling of this tale and turn it over officially to Andy.

As we were headed back along the path towards the car, it seemed like Les was looking at me all funny, like something was up. Granted, I had been carrying the water bottle on my left side the entire time and tried my best to keep her on my right side, but I thought I was being sly enough to not make it obvious. Anyway, we were walking back and I had a place picked out in my mind where we could stop and talk for a little bit...until I saw a slow moving family of 4 coming our way. So instead of stopping we just kept on walking until the end of the trail. At that point, I figured I had carried this thing in my pocket long enough, slow moving family of 4 be damned. So as we stood on top of the 20% incline, I took a knee, more excited than nervous (all those previous conversations meant this was going to be like taking candy from a baby), and pulled out the small jewelry box from my left coat pocket and popped the question. A kiss and a giant bear hug later, I looked her in the eye and said "well, are you going to take the ring?" After the look of "I had completely forgotten about that part" left her face, she put the ring on and gave me another bear hug. Strangely, this one did not feel like the first one, probably because while there were two arms around me, there was only one hand as the other one was outstretched so she could check out the ring some more.

So that is the story, and we are sticking to it. Luckily for Les, she agreed to take the walk, and the trail was beautiful, because no walk or an ugly trail meant she was going to have a naked ring finger for a few more days.

In case anyone is interested, we are getting married August 8, 2009 in Evansville, Indiana. For all you who are now mumbling things like "why there?" and "where is that again?", rest assured that there is a riverboat casino nearby (good old Casino Aztar) to entertain the degenerate gamblers that we count among our friends.

A lazy Saturday morning

Bon jour! I hope this finds you all well. We are currently doing pretty much nothing and it is fabulous. I have some laundry downstairs in the washer, so eventually I will have to go get it and put it in the dryer. Laundry here takes about two hours to wash and one to two hours to dry, so it is quite a time consuming project. The laundry room in our building (and all buildings in Luxembourg) is in a common room in the basement, but we have our own dedicated washer and dryer (that we also own -- just another thing to try and sell in two years!). The dryers don't vent outside, they are condensers, so it pulls the water out of the clothes and deposits it in a reservoir that you occasionally empty down the drain or use as distilled water for ironing. I'll pause while those of you that know me well howl at the idea of me ironing something. I will have to suck it up and do a little ironing later this weekend, though, as our shipment from the US finally arrived on Wednesday after being en route since August 21st. I am a happy girl. Some of my suits are pretty wrinkly and will have to go to the cleaners, but a few I am hoping can be ironed out okay. Andy's suits were beyond hope and are now spending the weekend at the cleaners with all of the other Luxembourgish suits. I am sure they will play nice but will be glad to be back home.



We went to Cologne, Germany last Sunday. I can't say it was our best performance as the seasoned travelers that we are...we pretty much got in the car, programmed "Cologne Zentrum" in to the TomTom and were off. We were about an hour away from our destination and while in slow traffic, this little "ding" went off and some sort of warning light in the car was flashing. Andy was driving, so I was charged with the task of reading the owners manual (in French) to try and figure out what the symbol meant. I thought I was reading that it was an indicator of a flat tire, so we pulled off at an exit and found three very nice German motorcyclists, who spoke a tiny spot of English and could read a tiny bit of French. After some gesturing and pointing at the manual and some kicking of the tires, we finally figured out among the five of us that the light must mean that something electronic was bad in the car, but that the tires were fine. So off we were back on the Autobahn (max speed for the day was a little shy of 200 km, or about 120 mph, and we still got passed) and later in the week figured out how to reset the electronic system and the car has been fine ever since. Every day is an adventure! Cologne was nice, but we had no map, no idea of what to see (other than the Hard Rock), and pretty much wandered around for a few hours looking for the Hard Rock or an internet cafe, only to eventually find out that it was about 150 meters from where we were, we had just turned right instead of looking down the street to the left. Amateurs! We had a delectable dinner, even though sadly Andy's favorite dish (chicken spinach artichoke dip) was no longer on the menu. At least the nachos were there.

We are close to finalizing our car orders, so hopefully they will get ordered this week. They are made to order in Europe, very few dealerships have more than just showroom cars on the lot. They usually have some that you can test drive, but no true inventory. Andy's will be a manual transmission, and since I am going to have to drive it to the Frankfurt airport on our way to the US for Christmas (Andy managed to fenagle his flight to the US as his return trip from his flight here, so he is flying from Lux to Frankfurt -- I will drop him off at the airport and then drive to Frankfurt and he will join up with me there and then we are on the same flight to Cincinnati), I am going to have to finally learn to drive a stick for real. I have been taught a few times, I think I could get through it in an emergency, but it would definitely not be pretty. We are going to have our first lesson tomorrow in the vacant parking lot (because everything is closed here on Sundays, even gas stations and grocery stores) of the, wait for it, IKEA. I hate that place and never want to go back, but there are not many large parking lots here so we will have to make another trip there this weekend. At least we don't have to return anything or buy anything. Ugh. I am sure driving lessons will make for some entertaining stories!

That is about all that is new here, other than we had a bad experience with grilling pork steak a few nights ago and ended up throwing it over the balcony into the woods. I am sure some animal was happy for a treat. I think we will stick to chicken for awhile until we learn our cuts of meat a bit better. We would have failed miserably on Letterman. Hope you are all happy and healthy!

Love,
Lesley

PS It is foggier than San Francisco here most mornings until about noon. Crazy.

Video Tour

Hi everyone, here's a link to a video tour of our apartment in Luxembourg. Be kind, it is hard to narrate a tour of an apartment with a video camera in your hand without sounding like a total goob.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9052395014433324937

Four weeks down!

Hi everyone,
Well, today marks exactly four weeks from the day I left the US and two weeks for Andy. We are doing well, we are finally mostly settled in to our new home in the Beggen neighborhood of Luxembourg. Any day now I will find the time to take pictures and maybe some video of our new place. The furniture is all assembled, thanks to Andy's hard work while I was at training in Geneva! We have some rugs down to soften it up a bit, since the entire apartment is floored in ceramic tile. The walls are completely white, which, for any of you who know my penchant for bright colors of paint can probably guess, is driving me a little crazy so the next big project will be to find some artwork for the walls and a way to hang it on the walls, since the walls are sometimes plaster, sometimes drywall, and sometimes some sort of painted or coated concrete. I wasn't there to witness, but apparently the handyman we had to install our ceiling lights had quite a time drilling into them. Rumor has it IKEA sells adhesive hooks for just such a purpose, so with a few things to return and ONE MORE piece of furniture to buy, we will likely head back to IKEA this weekend to see what we can find. We are also planning to go car shopping either Friday afternoon or Saturday as whatever we decide on will then have to be approved by Deloitte for our budget and then ordered from the factory, as they will make our cars to order. Crazy, but I guess that is what happens when you are probably only about two hours from the factory itself. We have a day trip to Cologne, Germany planned for Sunday (about a 2.5 hour drive). There just happens to be a Hard Rock Cafe there, so again, any of you knowing my collection of Hard Rock shot glasses will fully understand the purpose behind this trip! I am sure we will squeeze in some sightseeing along the way.

Andy started work this week and it seems to be going fine, although I will let him fill you in more on that separately. We also have a trip planned to Vienna with some friends from London for a Christmas market on the first weekend of December, and are hoping to make one other trip somewhere sometime in early November.

We are having fun getting settled, our motto remains, "Every day is an adventure!", and we are doing fine. Tonight's big event will be to cook a real dinner with actual meat and vegetables. Grills are not common here other than in summer months, so we are hoping to get an electric grill cook up some chicken on our terrace. I cooked pasta on Sunday night and we had a bottle of wine with it, but other than a can of ravioli and a frozen pizza, it has been a lot of evenings at restaurants. We are both getting a little tired of that and are hoping to get into a better routine of cooking soon. Our freezer compartment in our fridge is the size of a freezer compartment in one of those 1.3 cubic feet fridges you find in dorms, so we will be making a lot of trips to the grocery! Speaking of the fridge, it is the size of a taller 1.3 cubic feet fridge, so there is not a lot of room for storage of cold stuff, either. Not to worry, though, we have managed to find plenty of room for our beer.

That is the main story from here for now, we are getting better at navigating life, the roads, the grocery, etc. Now if we could only get the VOIP phone and the Slingbox to work! Oh, and rumor has it our ocean freight shipment arrived last Monday in Antwerp, so hopefully soon we will have our 19 boxes delivered so we can then realize we still don't have quite enough storage for clothing and can go buy some more IKEA closets. Fun times! I will just be glad to have something else to wear other than the clothes I brought with me. I have been now wearing the same 5-7 outfits to work for nearly two months. I might burn them when the replacements arrive.

Hope you are well and happy and heavily invested in cash.

Love,
Lesley

My first Luxembourgish post

Hello everyone,

Well, the other blogger has officially arrived, but now the other one is missing. She is currently in Geneva, leaving little old me to get the place in order. Things have been going well here at the new place, although I have put together enough Ikea furniture to drive even the most docile Swede nuts. We are living in a 2 floor, 2 bed condo/apartment/duplex (crazy Euro term) but whatever it is, it is home. It is new construction so we are the first to live in this space, but as new construction, I think it breeds dust.

The last few days have been quite hectic so let's see if I can recap. I know how to get to Ikea, and I have practiced getting there 4 times, including Friday after I arrived, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday. We made our big purchases on Saturday morning in under an hour, and then proceeded to take 3 more hours to leave. After we had pulled all of our merchadise and had the rest brought from the back, we decided we would rent a truck to bring it back to the new place. And now the fun begins...the "truck" was nothing more than a hatchback on steriods so Lesley and I decided we would each drive one since one just wasn't going to cut it. Lesley was still finalizing some things inside when I took the first load to the first truck. That is when I noticed the truck was manual, not automatic. Now Lesley claims to be able to drive stick in an emergency, but in a rented truck, full of stuff from Ikea, on the autobahn did not represent a big enought emergency to test the theory. So now we were down to one truck (Lesley's was returned free of charge) and the sweet station wagon that Lesley has been driving. While Lesley was returning the truck, I loaded up my truck and prepared to put the queen size mattress in it. We knew it would be tight, and after much pushing and pulling it was in, or almost in. Apparently hatchbacks on steriods are not on the long side, so a queen mattress hangs out the back door by a good foot or so. After I sent Lesley in to get some rope to tie the doors shut, a nice guy told me driving with the doors open, even tied shut, was not exactly legal. Great. Truck #2 returned and time to get the stuff delivered. Returning the truck ended up being a blessing in disguise, because that is how we met the nice Belgian girl from Ikea whose parents just happen to live near Canton, Ohio and spoke perfect english. I think she was so excited to meet people from Ohio, especially one from so near her parents, she decided to be our little helper. She helped unload the truck and arranged our delivery with the french only speaking delivery guy. We recieved our delivery about 3 hours later, which meant we had to lug in over 600 kgs (1320 lbs to you Americans) to our place. We spent the rest of the day cleaning and setting stuff up, did the same on Sunday, and I have continued to do that all this week. As it is, everythings except for one kitchen table chair (missing piece), the kitchen table (damaged) and one armoir is put together and ready to go. The armoir is tomorrow's task.

What else...we also got lights yesterday. These crazy Luxemburgers just have wires hanging from the ceilings when you rent, you need to supply your own fixtures. I can make my way around US electricity well enough to put up a light, but figured I would let a professional take care of it here. It is a good thing I did, as I would have needed to drill through what I think was concrete or something of the sorts. That would have been mighty difficult considering I do not have a drill here. And after watching the guy for 3 hours or so, I am pretty confident that if I would have done it, I would sitting here typing in the dark.

Today we got our washer and dryer delivered and had our cable and internet hooked up. Our cable has a whopping 7 channels in english, all of which are news channels. And Luxembough seems to lack any pubs with American sports being shown so I am wallowing in self pity.

One other item of note is that since we now have the internet, we should have phone, but that is not quite true at this moment. I cannot seem to get a dial tone yet, which means I have to figure out what I doing wrong. When I figure it out, I will let everyone know. The phone number will be my old cell phone number, so it will just be like calling me in Cincinnati, except with a 6 hour time difference.

Well, I am sure I have bored you to death with my new-ish update but hopefully with my co-author back tomorrow, we can work up some witty humor for everyone to enjoy.