Life Abroad.

With all of my commuting, courses, and adjustment, I haven’t yet had much time to do a decent post about the basics here in Luxembourg. Mostly they’ve been shorter in word content and full of pictures! I will try to do at least one “wordy” post per week and keep the rest of the days coming with pictures and shorter anecdotes.

So, to start off I will cover the basics of my daily existence here in Luxembourg – who I live with, how I eat, courses, and how I communicate.

Host family: I live with a “host-mother” called Monique, who lives alone except for her dog Kalinka, and is divorced. She has a son, Alex, slightly older than me, who’s attending school in London (and whom I will probably never meet). There's another son, who has a local hotel called Hotel Carlton, which is right across from the train station. She works there 1-2 mornings per week. She also has a daughter, Barbara, who is 30-something and has a 5-year old daughter of her own. So, Monique is on her own and has been hosting students with the Miami Luxembourg Exchange program for 8 years. She does every fall and spring, so that really adds up! She’s really great though – extremely accommodating and present when you need her to be, but also leaves us alone when we need to be. Sometimes a couple days pass without seeing her at all, simply because our schedules conflict, which is completely fine!

Living situation: I live with 1 roommate – Angelina - in Monique’s home, which is located in Luxembourg City. As I mentioned, this is a hustling and bustling city center; maybe not as intense as America’s NYC or DC, but a busy city all the same. We are a bus ride and a train ride away from the Chateau, which is in Differdange and is where all of the courses are taught. All together, the commute takes about an hour. Now that we’ve been here for a week, we’re realizing that we need to work on our assigned reading during this time – otherwise it’s 2 useful hours per day that gets sucked away! Luckily, now we’re comfortable enough to sit down and get into an assignment during this time.

I get around on train and bus for free in all of Luxembourg by using this Jumbo Pass, which was distributed to me through the school.

Eating: My eating here is essentially the same as at home – I eat the same things! Not really because of being narrow-minded and not wanting to branch out, but because it’s basically the same as what is offered at home. Normally at home, I abstain from large quantities of dairy and bread, do not eat red meat, and only occasionally eat fish or poultry, and eat a lot of eggs and chocolate. The only thing that’s been a little bit culturally “unusual” here is my lack of bread consumption – it’s definitely a very important breakfast food. When I told Monique that I wouldn’t normally eat bread, she ran around the city trying to find all sorts of gluten- free alternatives. She presented me with a gluten-free loaf, which I do nibble on a bit everyday. Even still, I normally start the day here with a banana and peanut butter (which I brought from home) and a small cup of coffee (which Angelina is sweet enough to brew every morning). I even found my almond milk and rice milk available here, which I wasn’t sure about!

Monique provides breakfast and we are given lunch at the Chateau four days a week. Sometimes the food is very good there, and sometimes it’s questionable. I always bring lots of fruit to snack on in case it’s the latter. We’ve also begun cooking at home and saving money by going to the Supermarché rather than restaurants.

Courses: For the most part, I am studying French, business, and history here. Some of my courses are from Miami teachers from Oxford, and others of the professors have only ever taught here. All of my professors are highly educated, male, and very passionate about their work. One difference from Oxford is that there will be A LOT of reading of history books – not textbooks, but memoir sort of books that one might be inclined to read on their own. Some of them are very dense, others are more interesting. I think the schoolwork will take longer to get done than in Oxford, because it does include heavy reading and essay writing, true to European educational form.

We get home everyday between 8:00 and 10:00PM. I did not expect this… they really keep us busy at the Chateau. On Monday and Tuesday evenings, we had supplementary lectures to attend, which is why we had to stick around. By the time we get home, we’re exhausted, since most mornings we are awake at some point between 5:30 and 7:00AM. I’m hoping that within the next few weeks, things settle down a bit.

On the bright side, Angelina, Alex, and I all have only 1 class on Wednesdays, which doesn’t meet until 3:30PM. Even now, this is marvelous, but in 8 weeks this class will be over – it’s a sprint course! That will leave Wednesdays completely free for us to explore Luxembourg. Since many of our weekends will be spent traveling – either on our own accord or with Study Tours – I’m glad to know that we have this day free to keep learning about this wonderful place that we get to live. Most evenings when we get home, it’s dark and everything is closed. It will be great to get to spend time during the day taking our own “field trips.” I really look forward to this.

We may return to the Luxembourg American Memorial Cemetery for one of our "field trips."

Communication and Language: I’ve always been a bit baffled by the language set-up in Luxembourg…should you address someone in French? English? German? Or Luxembourgish? Obviously I only am able to attempt two of the above, but in Luxembourg everyone is educated in all of those languages. It seems that you can address anyone in English and they will respond accordingly, but for the most part I’ve been using French, which is fine too. Sometimes someone will begin speaking to us in Luxembourgish, and I have to ask for “Français.” In the past week, I know that my language skill has developed already, simply because I’ve been forced to use it practically. I hope that I’ll be very confident in my French when I return home at the end of the program in May.

To communicate locally, I use this tiny (and fossil-like) cell-phone, which all students paid for and were given by the school, and when I have Wifi I can FaceTime and Skype at home. Mostly (because of the time difference), I email. Of course, the blog helps too =]