Trip to the city of Luxembourg

Today I took a trip to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, more specifically the city of the same name within it. My father used to work there during the time when I was a child of 2-3 to 6 years, so back then I used to visit it relatively often. I had not seen it in a dozen years now though, and thus decided to pay it a new visit.



The first (and sadly only) familiarity, but also a big change awaited me right at the border. I remember that back in the early 90s, our car was always stopped and controlled at the border checkpoint. Today, said checkpoint is completely deserted. Thank you, European Union!



The landscape around the area was quite idyllic, abundantly elevated by hills covered in forest or fields with a small villages once in a while.



However, this provincial flair seemed to mock the unsuspecting visitor. For before one can even penetrate the inside of the city, the country's incredibly wealth reveals itself and a seemingly endless alley opens up. Wide and to both sides lined with buildings of banks, one bigger and more extravagant than the other, and all in splendid condition of course.







This was followed by a few buildings housing EU functions. ...paling in comparison and seeming almost laughably simple in contrast.



After this lengthy parade of trees and the representative housings of banks, the only thing preceding the actual city is a high and lengthy bridge. One whose sides are covered with two layers of safety measures, as it is quite a popular site for people wanting to end their lives through a deep dive into the valley.



Upon parking, there was once again a most impressive showcase of Luxembourg's healthy economy. The parking site was free!

After a small but pretty underpass, there opened up a large park, whose bright grassy centre was, for some reason, littered with trash bins.

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Some monuments and their backgrounds

I decided to look up the people and events immortalised in a few monuments I encountered on my travels during summer break. Sadly I could not determine the origin of a statue in Brugge as the inscription had become unreadable and the stone man standing on a socket in Zierikzee as I was too far away to read the table below it. And I omitted a statue of pope John Paul II in Stargard Szczecinski due to it being fairly obvious who was depicted there, and who he was.

Szczecin



Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish-Lithuanian born in the territory by then occupied by Imperial Russia, was a famous poet of national romanticism. He grew up in Russia but with strong emotional ties to his true homeland, which also eventually led him to be arrested after being suspected of political opposition. He was then moved to St. Petersburg for 5 years, from where he eventually left the empire and headed to Rome and afterwards Paris, swearing not to return to his homeland till it be freed. During this time he wrote a lot of romantic poems about Lithuania, however in Paris his life soon became dominated by poverty and illness. He was a personal friend of Frederic Chopin, who visited him to play for him and also composes scores for a few of his written works. Eventually he died of cholera in Constantinople, to where he went to partake in the Crimean War, as a volunteer if a Polish legion.




This monument serves to remind of the victims of protests in 1970 in northern Poland, ignited by a sudden rise in food prices. In Gdansk, Gdynia, Elglag and Szczecin, the army fired on workers returning to work after demonstrations on December 17. The massacre's hundreds of causalities in turn provoked further strikes in other cities, all of which were violently and bloodily repressed. Eventually the government lowered the prices, raised the wages, and apologised to the workers.


Brugge






Dominating Brugge's marketplace Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck, a butcher and a weaver who were the leaders of the Bruges Martin in 1302, a nightly assault of Brugge's people on the French garrison stationed in the city at the time, as King Philip IV of France was trying to subdue the self-confident Flanders that was de jure a subject to his crown. In response to the massacre, the French rallied a large attack to punish the region and control it once and for all. This was however countered by two groups consisting of Flemish militias from Brugge, Gent, and a few other cities. Pieter de Coninck was one of their commanders, and in the Battle of the Golden Spurs they defeated the French decisively. Due to these events in which the Flemish people themselves rose up against their oppressors especially in the period of national romanticism their leaders were praised as heroes of Flanders ensuring the region's continues existence and identity as well as the preservation of the Dutch language there. It also left an impression on Europe in terms of military, as their militia consisted solely of well-armed infantry which was able to critically defeat the mounted French knights.

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