Last Luxem-blog

Well, this is it. The movers come to pack up our things tomorrow, and ship them back to California. For my final blog, I wanted to do a walk through the Wednesday morning farmer's market that I have come to love.


Here we are waiting for the bus into town.












Location of excellent bread (du pain) and croissants.








































Sam wouldn't let us eat in peace, so here he is eating his first croissant.















We bought some excellent buffalo mozzarella, Parmesan cheese, and fromage blanc (white spreadable cheese, mmmm) from this truck. The woman with the microphone interviewed me in french and asked me what I was buying and how I was going to prepare it. I'm quite proud of my self for being able to say that my family was going to have a pick-nic with the excellent cheese.











Anna knows we always buy flowers at the market. This time it was some freesia.











Mmmmmmm... roast chicken.











With a full stroller, we head back home.





Good-bye Luxembourg. We will miss you!

Stereotypes

I was thrilled to be able to catch this travel advertisement on the back of one of our much loved & used Luxembourg city buses. The Texan smoking a giant cigar is awesome--- come to America and see cowboys! This is the second advertisement for traveling to the USA that I've seen. I haven't been able to catch the first on film; it's a blond cheerleader in a sparkling red, white & blue sequin number with terrible red lipstick. Ahhh, what does this say about how Europeans view Americans? It's sad but likely a true image of what they think of us.

I clicked the link and was able to get close ups of the 3 ads they are using. Too funny!

Big Foot

At my goodbye dinner last week I was reminded of a culture shock experience I had when I first got to Luxembourg. I went shopping for shoes, winter boots specifically at the mall near our house and the memory of it has made me never go shopping for myself here in Luxembourg again.

To start out, I have big feet, and actually hardly anything about me could be considered small. But, before pregnancy, I hung onto the end of the 'normal' range in the states with a size 10. Being pregnant with Anna however, caused my feet to grow by 1/2 size. This makes it difficult, but not impossible to buy shoes in the states. Now, I move to Europe and need winter boots (it's cold here folks), so Anna and I take the bus to the local mall. I find some really cute boots and ask the sales lady for the equivalent of a US size 10 (thinking there's no way they would have a 10.5) and the woman got the most horrified look on her face. Let's also remember I am having this conversation in my broken french. After a few moments of very uncomfortable silence, the saleswoman picked her jaws up off the ground, verified my grotesquely large size and went to look in the back. When she returned, she assured me that not only did the boots I wanted not come in my size, but that in the whole store, there were NO boots in my size. I left, feeling freakish in my big feet and promptly ordered boots on Zappos.com and shipped them to my mother-in-law for her to bring to me in her suitcase.

I have subsequently heard that there are bigger sizes of shoes and clothing available for women in German stores, but after this shopping incident, I haven't been able to regroup for anything but online shopping :) Sammy's cute feet pictured above are after he crawled around the sand box at the park last week.