Amerrrrican Mail

Makes getting your mail each day just that much more fun. Off of desolate highway 25 in central CA.

World Currencies

3+ years of travels, 30+ currencies, 5 continents. No worries, 50,000 Vietnamese Dong, 2,000 Costa Rican Colones, 1000 Chilean Pesos, 50 billion 1993 Serbian Dinars, and 500 2011 Serbian Dinars aren't exactly worth the equivalent weight in gold. Scandinavian bills were a bit too valuable to keep :)

Luxurious Lux

I visited Lautauro in Luxembourg a few days before flying back to the US. While not the most scintillating place in the world, it does have some redeemable factoids. For example, they speak luxembourgish (even the name is weird), which is some strange combination of german and french with their own twist to it, and a few Dutch like pronunciations tossed in there. Most Luxembourgish people can speak at least 4 languages.... Luxembourgish, French, German, and English. Sometimes more.

The old part of the city is set on the side of a massive canyon. I imagine this was handy for fending off those pesky invaders in medival times. An nice for dropping hot oil buckets on them. There are some narrow roads which traverse to the bottom and back up to the other side. However, for the lazy people, they built an elevator. It reminded me a lot of this elevator that I rode in in Salvador, Brazil. But being in Europe, and frankly in one of the richest countries in the world, this elevators purpose isn't exactly to skip over a dangerous favela. It's merely a convenient way of getting down the hill quickly. And it's cut through the rock, so no view on the descent :(

The setting really is beautiful at this time of year, with all the shades of greens and blooming flowers. Otherwise, it seems like a pretty boring place to live. Its a small country (only 20 minutes from the belgian border to the central station by train!), and from the people I talked to, you need to really try hard and use a lot of various methods to meet people and find stuff to do. Even with so many for

Lau showed up in a blazer. In a high class place like Luxembourg, you gotta wear nice clothes, or at least pretent. Not his typical bum clothes he has worn in our previous meetups in different countries. He lives in a city outside luxembourg, filled with Portuguese and Brazilian people, and so we took the train there after checking out the city and meeting up some girl Lau arranged a Russian-Spanish language exchange with online (in a Russian speaking 'Russians in Luxembourg' forum, nonetheless). That was odd, but interesting. We also went to a local pub in his town (the only one) for a drink and met some random local luxembourgish kids.

Bottom of the hill

Sporting his new shirt which I picked up in Cambodia for 2 bucks.

Chifrijo

Tico (Costa Rican) food isn't exactly known as a home run, although it greatly surpassed any prior expectations of being just bland beans and rice. I really liked almost all the food I had there. This dish, chifrijo, is a serious grand slam. A layered dish of red pinto beans, rice, fried pork fat and beef chunks, onions, cilantro, corn tortilla chips, and tomatoes.

 This is also a super delicious dish called casado, just a mix of stuff, black beans, rice, patacones (fried plantain slices...so delicious), a salad, and either some shrimp chicken, or beef.

 

Guess this is why there are a lot of overweight people in Costa Rica. Good food, not of the slimming type, and large portions!