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?

A fair and a star

I knew there was something I forgot to tell you in my last blog, but I thought that since I'd sorted through all of my photos, I mustn't be missing anything. But I forgot that I didn't take my camera to Luxembourg the other week when we visited the Schueberfoeur.

The Schueberfouer is a fair in Luxembourg that has been going since 1340, when it was founded by John the Blind, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxembourg. That's a pretty sweet pedigree. That makes this year's edition the 674th of the fair!

There's nothing particularly historic when you get in there though. It's pretty much your standard fun-fair, with a mix of carnival rides, food stalls and sideshow attractions. (Jules and I were talking about fairs, and apparently they don't have the sort of school fairs we have back home, where everyone will bake cakes to raise money for the school and if you're lucky you'll get dragged around a field on a "magic carpet ride" hooked up to the back of a 4 wheel drive. Dommage.) There are lots of people - it apparently attracts around 2 million visitors each year, which either means a lot of Luxembourgers go more than once, or a lot of people come from outside the country, since that's around 4 times the country's population. Unlike the Luxembourg national day celebrations, it wasn't tooo crowded, although it was getting pretty packed by the time we left.

At the Schueberfoeur

One of this year's new attractions was the Skyfall, the world's largest movable free-fall ride at 80 metres tall. The view from the top was pretty amazing, but this has got to be one of the most terrifying things I've ever done. I wasn't even so much mentally scared as physically scared. I think there's a point where your body goes "that's it, I'm going to die". Even worse was doing it again after the first time!

Those are people up there

Up we go! Jules stayed on terra firma to take pictures

Waiting for the g-g-g-ghost train

Later on, after enjoying some delicious gromperekichelcher, we took a ride on the Ferris Wheel, itself 55 metres high, which gave us some great views of the fair.

View of the fair from the Ferris Wheel, with the Skyfall in the background

Visiting the fair also gave me the chance to catch up with one of my former colleagues

Jules

Et moi

Fast-forward to this weekend (skipping over our trip to Aachen for the moment) and the big event was our Michelin-starred lunch. Saturday was a gorgeous day, so we went out and about a bit before and after to enjoy it. It was the journées du patrimoine, but unfortunately we didn't have time to see anything since obviously the lunch took up the middle of the day. Instead, we visited the Botanic Gardens. Which if you ask me aren't very botanic, since there were no signs or anything telling you what the different plants were, and the greenhouse-looking thing is actually a (very hot) cultural/music venue as far as we could tell. Not the most impressive place in the world, but quite nice on a lovely sunny day regardless.

A beautiful day in the botanic gardens

Help! Crocodile attack!

It got me!

Then it was off to Bruneau, to "Dine with the Stars". This is a special promotion where you can go to have lunch or dinner in a range of Michelin-starred restaurants throughout Belgium. The deal being, it's a bit cheaper than normal, but you have a "surprise" menu. I sort of wimped out on the surprise even before we got there by writing "please no mushrooms" on the reservation, luckily enough since they were indeed featured in the main dish. Damn mushrooms are everywhere. I also had to get Jules to tell the waiter that I didn't want the coffee icecream dessert. I would have tried most things, but I really hate coffee. I can't even stand the smell. If there was a choice between nothing or a coffee dessert, I'd pick nothing. The restaurant went one better though, and brought me a chocolate tart! Could not have been happier, they called that one right!

First was an amuse-bouche of a mini goat's cheese waffle, followed by a trio of hors d'oeuvres - a pea soup, a cold sea bream preparation and a cod croquette. These were all really nice (especially the deep-fried cod bite), I forgot to take photos though.

Next was a "mosaic" of fish, made of salmon, eel and caviar, served cold. This is the sort of thing I'd never order, and I did leave some of the gelée, but that's actually just because it got in my head. When I was actually eating it without thinking about it, it tasted fine, but once I started really looking at the gelée, I couldn't any more. I don't even like gelée on the top of fruit tarts or whatever.

Fish "mosaic"

Second course was venison, normally served with a mushroom toast, but in my case served with a fig concoction. That thing at the front that looks like cheese is actually celery! The texture was a bit strange on its own, sort of like butter, but when eaten together with the venison it melted into it deliciously. The meat was perfectly cooked - again, venison wouldn't normally be my first choice on a menu - and the pommes dauphines were so good, I could have eaten a plate of them on their own.

Venison

Next was the famous chocolate tart, served with hot liquid chocolate and, hidden in the icecream, something I don't even know what it was, but it crackled like pop rocks when you put it in your mouth. So good! I bet that's how they would describe it on a menu - crackles like pop rocks...

Chocolate tart

It's not often a plate of sweets makes me groan, but the selection below that came with Jules's coffee was the straw that broke our stomachs' spirits. We did still eat them all though...

Mignardises

So, a very nice lunch, and I enjoyed the concept of the surprise menu even if I did cheat a little bit. They were very nice and accommodating about making those changes, which is great. It was nice to do it at lunch as well, as the restaurant was pretty quiet. Only complaint was that it was a little bit too hot in the room for me, and there was no air-conditioning, and the décor is a bit hotelly, but that is being picky.

We took a post-prandial stroll to the nearby Basilica to work off some of the calories (and sober up a bit, at least in my case). It wasn't really anything special inside (and a particularly irritating priest was baptising a baby in there), but it's apparently the 12th biggest church in the world and the world's largest Art Deco-style building (says Wikipedia). It doesn't look all that Art Deco to me, but what do I know?

Sacred Heart basilica

Photographing the view from the basilica steps

Me and Jules at the basilica

Then it was time to go home, watch qualifying on delay and basically loll about nursing our food babies. Good day! And on Sunday, I stayed in my PJs all day and watched Hamilton win the F1, which also counts as a very good day in my book :)