A very Luxembourgish Easter

Much of the time, I hardly feel like I have an Exotic Boyfriend™ at all. He understands and speaks English so well that there's no scope for those cutsey mistakes and understandings you often hear about (barring the occasional habit of saying "bowel" when he means "bowl"). But one good thing about having an Exotic Boyfriend™ is learning about traditions in another culture. Or teaching him about your traditions. Or, in this case, telling him about traditions in a third country and he doesn't believe you.

When we had our first Easter together last year, we had only been dating for just over a month, and he decided to torture me by inviting me to Easter lunch with his entire family - cousins, aunt, uncle, grandma, brother, mum, the works. He claims this was being nice, as otherwise I would have spent Easter alone in my dank apartment, probably scrubbing a fresh pee stain off the couch (probably true), but it was all kinds of horrifying for someone as socially awkward as myself. Anyway, the point of this is way back then, I told him that in France, Easter Eggs are brought by church bells, not the Easter Bunny, and he didn't believe me. I'm not sure why, as on one of our first dates I was famously proven right on the fact that there are about a million feral camels in Australia (or, rather, there used to be - apparently they've gotten quite killy on the feral camel front in recent years (and the refugee front, badoom tissh), but that wasn't the part of the fact that was in dispute, so victory was still mine). So anyway, I was probably trying to pretend to be a good girlfriend and repress the part of me that likes to be proven right at all costs, and the matter was apparently dropped. Until this year, when I brought it up again, and he still wouldn't believe me until we watched a really frustratingly slow YouTube video on the subject.

He brought it up at this year's Easter dinner, and his Grandma informed us of the rest of the story from the Luxembourgish point of view, which is that the church bells do indeed fly away to Rome to confess their sins (really, how much can you get up to as a bell?) and, furthermore, while they're gone, kids go around the villages making a racket with wooden rattles and so forth and sing a little song, to make up for the missing noise of the church bells.  They then have the effrontery to demand money for the task of annoying everyone for the past few days. Which makes me extra happy that we were in Germany, not Luxembourg, in the days leading up to Easter.

Another Easter tradition in Luxembourg is the Easter Monday fair of Eemaichen, held in Luxembourg city and in Nospelt. We headed along to Nospelt to check out this very popular event - there was even a free bus, as so many people descend upon this tiny town for the occasion. The fair revolves entirely around clay whistles shaped as birds, called Péckvillchen. You wouldn't think that would be enough to pull in the punters year after year, but I suppose tradition's tradition. And the bird whistles were cute, plus we watched a demonstration of how they're made.

Demonstrating how a péckvillchen is made

I wonder what happens to the giant bird the rest of the year?

A plethora of péckvillchen

And of course, I had to select a lucky péckvillchen to come home with me to Brussels. I can't get it to whistle though! (In case you're wondering, you blow in its bum...)

One last tradition is to dye hard-boiled eggs (as in many places), and then you each take one and tap them against each other's, the loser being the one whose egg cracks. The punishment is having to eat the egg. Kind of like conkers, if you had to eat the conker afterwards. We got given some eggs from a bunny at the fair, so we played, and I lost, but declined to eat an egg that had been festering in a bunny's pouch.

Any interesting Easter traditions in your part of the world?

Nancy girl

This is mostly a post about Nancy (the city), but let's wrap up a few other things I've been up to lately. For Easter, I went to Jules's mum's place, where I had the pleasure of meeting half his family all at the same time. Which is obviously a massive treat and not at all scary. I lie, it was scary, I awkwardly shook his mum's hand and didn't know what to do with myself most of the time. Luckily everyone (while making an effort to speak English with me) spoke amongst themselves in Luxembourgish most of the time, so while that meant my presence at the table was mostly ornamental, it also meant I couldn't make too much of an idiot of myself. Jules theorised that they were more afraid of (speaking English with) me than I was of them, which makes me sound a bit like a spider, but I'll take it. Seriously though, everyone was very nice, it didn't go terribly, and it was nice to have something to do at Easter for the first time in many a year.

On the other hand, I have seen Jules's mum assembling a gun in her living room (I kid you not), so I think maybe I need to be on my best behaviour around her! I think that's the first time I've seen a gun not wielded by a police officer, and even then it freaks me out. Bit weird!

Over Easter, we also went for a walk around Luxembourg's Lac de la Haute Sûre, which Jules informs me is just known as "the lake" to the natives, since it's pretty much the only one in the country. It amuses me that it's the only one and it's not even a real lake - it's man-made for electricity generation. No offence, but Luxembourg, while pleasant, is a pretty featureless place. They found like a claw from a dinosaur recently - the first ever found in the country - and it was front-page news. The lake is pretty though, although most of the bit we walked around unfortunately had too many trees to really get a good view of it.

At the lake

Last weekend we decided to take advantage of perhaps the first genuinely hot and sunny weekend of the year to take a daytrip to nearby Nancy. It really was a lovely day, and Nancy is really charming. We saw the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy (separate post to follow), the Basilique Saint-Epvre, Place Stanislas and the Parc de la Pépinière, but I felt like we just scratched the surface of what there is to see in the city.

The Basilique Saint-Epvre is a 19th-C neo-gothic structure filled with some really lovely stained-glass windows. I think some of the windows may have been done by the Art Nouveau artists of the Ecole de Nancy.

Basilique Saint-Epvre

Ferdinandus O'Gorman is improbable enough a name as it is, let alone featuring in a stained-glass window in Eastern France

We had lunch in the regal (or, rather, ducal) Place Stanislas, which I recently saw featured in a list of the best places to have an apéritif in France. Most importantly, though, number one on that list was Place Plumereau in Tours, booyah! Place Stanislas is definitely more visually impressive, but it's also huge. Whereas Place Plumereau, in summer, is completely filled with café tables, and there are cafés, restaurants and bars on all sides, in Place Stanislas there are only a couple of café/restaurants on one side, with a relatively small space given to their tables. So I've got to agree that Place Plumereau probably takes this one out, although Place Stanislas is definitely a nice place to take some photos and enjoy a drink in the sunshine.

It took forever to get photos by the fountain, by the way. We arrived like 2 seconds behind this group of tourists, who remained completely oblivious to the fact that we obviously wanted to take photos too, and kept sitting on the fountain for about 10 minutes. Grrr.

Place Stanislas

Alley leading into Place Stanislas

Finally a photo with the fountain

Proof that Jules is taller than me. I did think he was, but for some reason thought only by a couple of inches and wouldn't believe him when he said he was c. 6 foot. PS someone got a little bit of a red shoulder while having lunch

Gates on the other side of Place Stanislas