Our flight to Luxembourg left London early. Not ridiculously early but early enough that leaving time to catch an Uber to the airport, checking in and getting breakfast meant that we had to set off early! All in all, I think I had about 3 hours of sleep before the flight. (Lloyd had a lot more).
Anyway, upon arrival in Luxembourg, it’s safe to say I was pretty knackered. I figured this feeling would last a while but upon arrival in Luxembourg and particularly as soon as we could see Luxembourg city in the distance, I instantly perked up as I’d just had 1,000 cappuccinos – it’s funny what excitement can do you!
We headed to the hotel to check-in but the hotel rooms weren’t ready yet so we dropped our stuff at the hotel and headed straight into town!
We meandered through side streets and alley ways to get to what is now of my favourite places in Luxembourg…
The aforementioned favourite place is the Chocolate House! It is situated outside the Grand Ducal palace in Luxembourg but you’d have to get lucky to get a seat outside – they’re really popular! We headed inside as we couldn’t get any seats outside…
I did a double-take as soon as we got in. I have mentioned so many times how much of a sweet tooth I’ve got and even though, I’m not the biggest fan of chocolate, I love sweet treats and boy do they have a lot of them here!
*P.S.: I need that Cabinet Of Curiosities in my house like right now!!!
After ordering our cakes, we headed on upstairs where waited for our cakes and coffees to arrive…
Turns out, it’s quite a cosy affair being sat inside too! Plus, you could still see the Grand Ducal Palace from the windows so it worked pretty nicely!
Here’s a word of warning – the cake is the Chocolate House are gigantic! (My favourite type of cake). Those cakes are probably made to be shared but each individual portion is HUUUGGGEEE – which of course I loved! I got the strawberry cake with layers of vanilla cream and jam.
Lloyd got the chocolate cake (which is pretty predictable – that boy loves chocolate!)
The look on my face pretty perfectly captures my delight when the cakes arrived!
Cakes and coffees safely stored in our tummies, we headed out to see more of the city – starting with the Grand Ducal Palace of course… The palace is no longer used in the typical way palaces are used and instead is used more as an office for the Grand Duke of Luxembourg (he’s to Luxembourg what the Queen is to the UK). It is open to the public at specific times in the summer (like Buckingham Palace) but not open to visitors for most of the year.
We went off to explore an area where there are lots of restaurants located in caves – twas a bit early for dinner but it was nice having a little gander here…
Little story about the wall below, when the Germans tried to make Luxembourg German during World War 1, Luxembourgers defiantly put up that writing on the wall saying “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” which translates to “We want to remain what we are” in English. This wall is approximately 100 years old now!
We then headed to what is called the most beautiful balcony in Europe – which is where you get an amazing view of lower Luxembourg city! The place generally lives up to the hype as it’s one of the best views in Luxembourg.
This area is the UNESCO World Heritage area of Luxembourg but will delve into that in more depth in another post.
I didn’t get the chance to do this in the last post – meet Sandy and Keyta! Sandy (on the left) is a true Luxembourger and an amazing lady and we had the privilege of having her show us around and she truly made our trip here amazing!!! Keyta blogs on www.thewayfarer.co and is one of the funniest and bubbliest people you’ll meet! She’s such good fun, a bundle of positive energy and an amazing travel companion. She’s also got a great blog so pop by her blog on www.thewayfarer.co and say hi (tell her we said hi too! 😉 )
Everyone was out enjoying sunshine, burgers, hot dogs and live music! There was also a lot of ice cream around but for some reason I couldn’t figure out where people got the ice cream from. I quickly went from not wanting ice cream to being obsessed by trying to find where this mysterious source of ice cream was! I didn’t even want ice cream at the start and by the time we left the square, that was all I wanted to eat! 🙂
Found this cute little guy – still have no clue if this is a fire hydrant, source of drinking water or just a source of water to keep your hands clean. If you do know, please let me know.
Finally, we arrived at the hotel much later in the afternoon than we initially intended and I have to admit, I did have a nap for an hour. I didn’t even realise when I nodded off – thankfully, I had an alarm set just in case so I got up promptly and got myself ready for dinner!
Dinner was in a restaurant with an amazing view…
We decided to sit outside! It was nice and warm and we all knew we’d have to make the most of it. (Full disclosure, it did get colder later but that was like hours later)…
After dinner, we headed downtown to check out the nightlife…
… and eventually made our way back home through a scenic route through Luxembourg city.
At the time, I had no idea where we were but on reflection the next day, I realised we’d walked through the part of the town that we could see from the balcony. It looked quite different from down below but nonetheless quite pretty! It’s safe to say that although we were all exhausted by the time we went to bed, we all felt rather fulfilled that we’d been able to get a fairly decent initial taster of Luxembourg city – and this is before the official guide of the UNESCO World Heritage parts of the city (a good portion of which you can’t see in these photos) but like I said, I’ll cover that all in another post!
So, what do you think of Luxembourg so far? 🙂
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