Finally, an Excuse to Go Back to Luxembourg
November 22-25, 2018
The first time we visited Luxembourg it was on the invitation of our good friend Spritzboi - a wonderful man whose helpfulness was a main reason we were able to keep afloat in the bureaucratic deluge of our early days in Berlin. Since he grew up in Luxi-land, Spritzboi was able to give us an intimate look at his tiny home country. In the summer of 2016, we gave him a curated tour of the Pacific Northwest, and it was on that trip that Spritzboi met Jessica, the woman who would become his wife.
After two years testing the waters with a long-distance relationship, which involved Spritzboi staying a few months at a time in Seattle and Jess visiting Berlin, the two decided to tie the knot. Jessica was able to transfer the job she had at Amazon in Seattle to the company’s headquarters in Luxembourg City, and Spritzboi agreed to move back to his hometown to start a family with his new American wife. Inadvertently, in showing Spritzboi the Northwest, we had set the wheels in motion to lose our best friend in Berlin. It was bittersweet, but we were thrilled for the two of them nonetheless.
Each year since we’d moved to Europe, Spritzboi had joined us for our American Thanksgiving celebration. In the 2017 iteration his mom had even come to town to visit, and we were lucky enough to be able to supply her with her first ever taste of the traditional American dishes (though we had to settle for a pear tart for dessert because pumpkin pie mix was too hard to source). Now that Spritzboi was back in Luxembourg and married to an American, it seemed right to move the party to them and continue the festivities in their new home.
The cheap flights into Luxembourg had us arriving late in the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, so we decided to postpone the holiday until Friday so we could give it the time and cooking energy it deserved. We picked what was supposed to be a nice vegetarian restaurant downtown for dinner, and proceeded to stuff ourselves there to a point of real discomfort – something that would become a running theme for the long weekend. The food wasn’t great, but there was a lot of it! Spritzboi and Jess explained that none of the restaurants in the area were all that impressive, but Luxembourgers were pacified as long as the portion sizes were big.
When we went to a nearby bar for a nightcap, the bartender informed us that there was a free German-language comedy show happening upstairs. Kirb and Mazz hesitated at the suggestion and were both ready to start up the conversation about how Germans weren’t funny, but Spritzboi ran upstairs without hesitation, so we followed. Jess didn’t understand much of the act at all, but we were pleased at how much of it we actually got. This was likely due to the fact the comedian was actually British and only performing in German, and it’s intrinsically easier for us to understand the language when the person we’re listening to also isn’t a native speaker. He did some humorous bits about dealing with bureaucracy at the Bürgeramt, and young Americans who think they can live forever in Berlin without getting a job or learning the language (relatable), but the funniest moment came when he sang a song about going to Ikea. In the middle of the song he went into a reggae breakdown and changed the words to, “Stoned at Ikea.” Within literally one second of this transition, a crusty, dreadlocked white dude appeared at the top of the stairs - as if he had materialized from a cloud of imaginary pot smoke - and began to do a lil stoney jig. It was not part of the act. Kirb nearly fell over laughing.
We love cooking, so we set aside the entire day on Friday to make a proper Thanksgiving feast with all the essentials. Our hosts had already graciously acquired the necessary groceries, so now it was just a matter of figuring out how to cook seven dishes in one compact kitchen. Luckily, they’d found an ex-pat store in town that stocked brown sugar and pumpkin pie mix – two ingredients that are otherwise impossible to find in European grocery stores. We started our day by fueling up with a breakfast of kochkäse and filet américain on fresh bread. Sprtizboi had remembered how much we enjoyed steak tartar for breakfast the first time we came to visit and had bought a big container of it from the butcher shop. It really is a stellar way to start the day.
Jess took control of the turkey, stuffing, and greens, and we got to work on the sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts with sriracha aioli, and gravy. To help conserve time and space, we baked the pie around midnight the night before when we got back from the comedy show. Throughout the day Spritboi gave the kitty cats the attention they needed, and Kirb found plenty of time to lay on the couch watching broadcasts of the football games from the day before that he streamed from his computer. We named our makeshift Thanksgiving restaurant “the Muff Stuff,” a play on Luxembourgish terms about a specific type of dingy (muffig) bar where old people go to eat (“stuff” means “living room”). It was an all-day cooking extravaganza, and the results were fantastic. All of us agreed it was one on the best Thanksgiving meals we had ever eaten, and definitely the best we had ever prepared for ourselves. The gravy – which we all agreed was the most important part – was off the charts.
Everything you could ever need on one plate
With Thanksgiving over, naturally it was time to start thinking about Christmas. The holiday markets were starting up that weekend in the city, so we drove into town to check them out. We’ve been to Christmas markets in several different European countries now, so there weren’t too many surprises from what we’ve come to know, but every country has at least one unique offering. In Luxembourg it’s the Gromperkichelcher, which for all intents and purposes is like a big fried hash brown patty.
Spritzboi knows that we are always looking for weird, unknown local treasures that tourists would never accidentally stumble upon, so he set up an evening for us playing Joueurs de Quilles at a bar called Café Medya in the nearby town of Dudelange. Neither of us were particularly sure what any of that meant, but we trusted our boi and went along happily. The four of us entered the divey, working-class bar and were escorted by the bartender to the basement, where she had to fiddle with the circuit breakers to get the lights on. We were delighted with what we found when the room finally lit up – a fully wood-paneled two lane 9-pin bowling alley that looked like it hadn’t changed in 40 years.
We asked the bartender if she knew the rules to the game and she didn’t, so she said she’d send down the owner and he would explain how to play. Strangely, he wasn’t any help either, saying that there were “lots of games you could play” without giving us a proper set of instructions for any of them. We made up our own game that was like Cricket for darts until Spritzboi’s friend Pierre showed up and gave us some proper instruction. Unlike traditional bowling, the lane is narrow for the first 10 or 15 feet, making it quite difficult to hit the pins on each side. The wooden balls have different sizes and weights, letting you use more spin or brute force depending how many pins are left. None of us were particularly good at it, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to play.
We ordered food from the bar, and were equally thrilled and weirded out by what showed up. The schnitzel that Kirb got was normal enough, but the bouchée à la reine that Mazz ordered was essentially French food sourced completely from canned ingredients, intended for undiscerning alcoholic grandpas. She was into the grandpa dinner, but was much more enthralled with a can of olives that she bought later in the evening from a discarded vending machine that was sitting on a bench. There was no way to know how old the can of olives was, but she insisted that they were exquisite. No one wanted to share them with her.
For our final day in Luxi-land, we invited Mamsch over to help us do work on the leftovers from our all day cook-a-thon. She’d never eaten pumpkin pie before, and we served it to her with an American flag on top. You’ll rarely find us being patriotic about much of anything these days, but we will give credit where credit is due. Thanksgiving is a wonderful and delicious tradition, and we are always thankful to be able to spend it with our adopted European family.