On Saturday, because it was nice weather, I went to Luxembourg. I figured I could do my uni reading on the train. Went for a stroll through the city, saw the medieval fortifications (or the remnants thereof), the cathedrals, the town hall, and the Grand Duke’s Palais, with the heavily armed guard (assault rifle with bayonet) in his Buckingham-Palace-Beefeater-esque box, and then spent an hour in the Musée d’Historie de la Ville de Luxembourg. Rather interesting; I could have spent 4 hours in there. But it was nice weather outside, and there was a flea market in the plaza outside the town hall, and they were closing. Much fun all round.

Sunday, for a lark, I wandered down to the part of Saarbrücken called Römerkastell (literally, “Roman Castle”) to have a look at the actual Roman Ruins after which the area is named. They’re there, hiding behind the Grand Market Place (think Queen Vic market, but much more downmarket - or perhaps the Corio Saturday Market at the greyhound course, for anyone who is familiar with that), overgrown by grass: just a few mostly-prismic stones, revealing the shape of where a few houses (from probably a much bigger village) stood. This was the crossing of the Roman roads from Trier to Strasbourg and from Metz to Worms, so Saarbrücken grew up here as a trading town. I also found the “Mithras Grotto”, where apparently in Christian Roman times the local barbarians/heathens secretly worshipped the Persian sun god Mithras. So that’s my really-really-old-stuff fix for this week.

Uni has started in earnest, and I’m starting to get past the stage of going-to-as-many-lectures-as-possible-in-order-to-select-subjects, and a subject selection is beginning to crystallise itself. There’s still the “initial meetings” for two more seminars tomorrow and Thursday, of which I will probably take one this semester (whichever one I get a place in - places in seminars are restricted and can be hard to come by), and that completes my subject selection. I might post the exact subjects at the end of the week when it’s finally decided… I’m not superstitious, I swear, but I’m not planning on jinxing my chances of getting into one of the seminars

This morning I got some rather big news… one of the shared apartments I had looked at in the last few weeks want me as their housemate. Yay I can move out of this temporary motel-like (albeit architect-designed) guesthouse, and into something more permanent. That also means next weekend will be filled with moving house (and perhaps finding some furniture).

And tonight I went down to frisbee training. There were about 20 of us, so we did some throwing for a warm up, a few drills, and then split into two teams for a short-ish game. ‘Twas fun; I’ll be doing that again. But man, am I unfit! I guess that’s hardly surprising, given the amount of physical exercise I’ve done in the past, oh, 16 months…

The first roll (of three) of photos of (mainly) Luxembourg is at http://www.ockle.org/photos (where else!). The reason there’s one roll rather than three is that one of the three rolls is black and white, which means it needs to be sent away for processing, they can’t do it in the lab, so that takes longer; and due to a misunderstanding only one of the two colour rolls was scanned onto CD. (I wondered why it was so cheap. I probably should have asked why I only got one CD, but silly trusting me just assumed they were saving the environment, since you don’t really need two CDs for 2 x 60Mb of photos. Meh.) The other two rolls will be added as they are finished, probably in the next day or two.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Story of my life, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.