MUDEC Travel Blog

Traveling to and around Luxembourg!

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ich gucke nicht (sie guckt)

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A bit of MUDEC slice-of-life, since this is mudec-blog and not luxembourg-travel-blog:

Puzzles in the Cave! This one was finished in less than 48 hours:

I didn't stick around for too long today, but I bet Mario Kart got finished, which will make 4 complete puzzles down here, which is like all of them. I think there's a 3D one and a 63-piece kid's puzzle. Maybe I should buy some puzzles for us?

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Today I planned to take a stop at Belval-Lycée, but accidentally ended up getting off a stop early at Belval-Rodange instead.

There is very little to do at Belval-Redange (and CFL plans to merge it with Belvaux-Soleurve eventually), but the French border is nearby, so I visited that:

It's nothing especially visibly remarkable, but I find these physical manifestations (and often definitions!) of political boundaries to be quite neat.

Having killed enough time to catch the next train, I took it a stop down to Belval-Lycée:

I couldn't get to the border easily here due to traffic, but it does have a feature unusual for a station of its size: an elevator!

The tracks take a bridge over the road, so the platform is also above the road. There's a staircase down, or of course the elevator. (If you're curious, it bore a ThyssenKrupp logo.) Train arrival information is conveniently located at both the station and ground levels.

Anyways, after an overall underwhelming Belval-Lycée experience, I decided to walk to Belval-Université to get some pictures of the Lycée that the station was named after. More interesting, though, was a dangerous bridge!

And American culture is never too far away.

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Today I had the afternoon free, so I thought I'd head to Schengen. A friend asked to tag along as well, so we went together. That trip finally taught me the important lesson to not rely on busses here, they will always be late. We had planned to take the train into the city, then a bus to Mondorf and connect to another bus to Schengen. There, we would see the borders and European museum.

Unfortunately, the Mondorf bus ran ~15 minutes late, so we couldn't transfer to Schengen. Instead, we stayed the afternoon in Mondorf, briefly crossing into France and then visiting the Luxembourg Aviation Museum.

We heard my first "Moien!"s of the trip here in Mondorf, and it was the first time that my German really came into use, asking a local who didn't speak English where we could get something to eat.

We came back through Bettembourg. I mention this just because I really like how the buses pass over the trains here, giving it that real interconnected transit vibe.

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I was in Detroit, so I would be remiss not to talk about technically the first rail transit of this trip: Express Tram, the Detroit-Wayne Airport people mover.

It spans the length of the very long Concourse A, which is All Delta All The Time™, so it also features Delta branding:

That red nose makes me think of another airline that recently changed their callsign though...

There's two trains, each with a handful of cars each. (I didn't actually count, maybe 3?) They're cable-driven and seem to operate on separate cables/tracks which align at the ends. They mirror each other, so when one train is at the north station, the other is at the south. They meet in the middle, and then swap ends.

The trains stop for about 30 seconds, then move for about 1:30. Therefore they move between platforms about every two minutes, and a train should arrive at each stop (each direction for the middle stop) every 4 minutes. My math suggests that getting to the train -> getting off the train takes an average of 3.5 minutes, as long as you're not going end-to-end. These numbers are extremely rough based on a handful of timings I did and will vary as the system responds to real-world fluctuations with people blocking doors, trying to get on at the last minute, etc. While the trains operate independently, they will always align with each other and might speed up or slow down a little to keep in sync.

More fun facts about the Express Tram (mostly from Wikipedia) include:

It's technically a hovercraft, not a rail vehicle, although it has guide rails so I'm going to count it.

It's completely driverless. DTW workers ride it but they're not conductors or anything.

This is the most interesting thing about Detroit

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Busy couple of days with orientation. Took a bus home last night, then a bus and train to the chateau this morning. Bus was 7 minutes late so I had to go to a backup option. Not an ideal introduction to free Luxemburg public transit.

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Oh yeah, and I have a longer post about Detroit that I just haven't gotten around to finishing yet because I haven't been free all that much.

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Busy couple of days with orientation. Took a bus home last night, then a bus and train to the chateau this morning. Bus was 7 minutes late so I had to go to a backup option. Not an ideal introduction to free Luxemburg public transit.

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Oh yeah, should probably post this here too. I'm in Luxembourg. Feels kinda unreal.

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Everyone's heading to de-icing today. Unfortunate that I'll get less time to explore Detroit.

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At CMH. First time since the pandemic, and first time I'll be flying alone. Rather worried about this snowstorm, but nothing to be done about it.

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Awake for what's essentially one long day now. I expect to get about 4 hours of sleep over the next ~32. In good news, my flight into Schipol has a good gate. This flight often does, but sometimes it's much worse. The bad news is that weather in Detroit and wind over the Atlantic is likely to slow us down.

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On a plane in 24h

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en:test post please do not ignore there will be a quiz

de:probepfoste bitte ignoriere ihr nicht es wird einen test geben

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