Luxembourg 2

More travelling around Luxembourg today. This time we walked down to the Place de la Constitution and caught one of the green buses that do a continual loop around the city - the hop on hop off fellers. Near the Philharmonie (a wonderful round building where concerts and such are presented) we got off and went into the Musée d’Arte Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. This has been built partly over old city walls and battlements - the originals are still there, but they’ve been built up again with modern stones and plaster. It’s a large glass and stone building, very light and airy, and with a very open feeling. And, after yesterday’s trials, it was great to find that not only did they have free lockers for our bags, but free toilets! (So we both went twice.)
The exhibitions are another story. At present there is a great deal on Science Fiction and Modern Life scattered around the place. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is very strange, and some of it is more philosophy than art. It was worth going to, but we might have felt more aesthetically satisfied if we’d made it to the Gallery that we keep missing out on seeing, which is in the older town.
The photo is of a house that was to have been the prototype of many similar places - until the 1973 oil crisis caused problems. The houses were to be made in plastic. Curiously enough, there’s a house constructed on exactly the same lines near Warrington, close to Dunedin. I think in fact that that house is bigger - and I don’t think it’s made of plastic.
After the Musée we got the bus again and went to the building which has a name that sounds like Ocean, but isn’t. It’s a large mall with an enormous supermarket on the first two floors (Celia was in her element in the supermarket: the choice!), and then up above are offices, in one of which our host actually works.
We had waited at the bus stop with a woman from Belgium. She’d been to Luxembourg a number of years ago and was astonished by the rapid rate of building along the area where the Musée and the Ocean are. The place has been taken over by Banks - Luxembourg has some 200, apparently - and not all of them are squeaky clean, according to what she was saying. There has been some scandal with Clearstream Banking and the French Government and others, for starters. But the EU also came in for some criticism: a man from one of the EU countries wanted to retire to Greece (I can’t remember at the moment where he came from). This should be perfectly acceptable under EU terms, but he’s been blocked from doing so. Not being the sort of person to take this lying down, he has made aggressive protest in the EU Justice System (which is in Luxembourg), talking in terms of dictatorship and other such pleasantries. He’s now been in Luxembourg for 250 days, fighting his case.
Luxembourgers are losing their own status in the face of thousands of workers who stream into the place daily from nearby countries, and through the many foreigners who live there permanently. I was asked by a German tourist how to get to the autobahn while I was waiting at the bus stop - of course I didn’t know, and neither did a young couple who came along, and neither did someone else. ‘Luxembourg is a city of strangers,’ I said to a woman standing by, and she agreed. No one really lives there, so no one knows anything about it.

Fakenham

Yesterday was wet and blowy in the morning (as it had been the previous afternoon) so we didn’t decide to do anything until the afternoon. The National Trust choices weren’t good because most of the ones we hadn’t seen were quite a way away, so we finished up going to Fakenham (pronounced Fake-nam).
Whether it was the dull day that didn’t greatly encourage us about Fakenham or whether it was just the town itself was inspiring, we didn’t feel much enthused about the place. The church seemed untidy and dim, and there wasn’t much to write home about it in it (though we met a bellringer who was waiting for some other campanologists to arrive for a session on the bells), and the shops were okay. But everything had a down-at-heel feel about it, as though the town didn’t have much pride in itself. Even the secondhand bookshop, situated in the basement of a café, smelt mouldy and the books weren’t very exciting. This may all be a completely subjective impression, and there is a new mall in Fakenham that looks good - although two or three of the shops are untenanted.
However, the saving grace of Fakenham was a little teashop called the Tudor Tea Room - seating for about 25 at a pinch - which advertised tea for 60p and coffee for only a little more. In the end we actually had one cream tea and a coffee, which meant we got a scone with jam and mock cream as well as the drinks. We shared the scone and toppings (I had all the butter) which meant our points for the day were rapidly reduced. (Had vege soup and toast for tea to make up for it!)
The thirty-something bloke running the teashop kept all the orders in his head - I never forget an order, he claimed - and was working full bore to keep up with all the customers, because the place was nearly full when we arrived. Probably nobody actually bought a tea or coffee for the cheap prices, because the other items in the place were quite enticing!