Pictures from London, Luxembourg

Since I currently live in Ireland, I took some short trips recently. I visited London for fun and Luxembourg for business, and I wanted to post a couple pictures of each.

London:

For the UK, the highlight of our trip (besides visiting friends) was a chance to see Buckingham Palace in Hyde Park, downtown London:

The Palace was really splendid in person. You could really feel this as the center of the British Empire back in the day. This was the emblem of the Victorian Era. My daughter liked the fountain especially.

Lastly, the obligatory photo of the Buckingham Palace guards:

Luxembourg:

First, let me post a nice picture of downtown Luxembourg:

On the right is the headquarters of the national bank, the Spuerkeess. It is not the Grand Duke’s Palace as I previously thought. On the left is the Luxembourg cathedral, as Luxembourg is mostly Roman Catholic. The bridge is over the famous valley cliffs called the Grund (sounds like “groond”) also known as the Gronn in the local Luxembourgish language.¹ Here’s what it looks like down in the Grund:

And here’s a photo of the Luxembourg countryside:

Lots of cows and beautiful Germanic forests. It was so great to see all this, and the American cemeteries from World War II, still maintained and honored.

Enjoy!

Namuamidabu

P.S. A belated “thank you!” to reader Kiki who provided a correction on the Luxembourg photo. I failed to update this page until 2010. :p

¹ A friend who lives in Luxembourg once told me recently that while French and German are the common languages spoken there, people take pride in Luxembourgish, and learning and speaking even a little helps make friends easily there. This same friend also stated that after exposed to Luxembourgish at length for years, he found German easy to understand as well.