A Taste of the Luxurious Life in Luxembourg

Category: Luxembourg

Posted on in 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

A Taste of the Luxurious Life in Luxembourg

Nicole Duby was a 2022-2023 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Luxembourg. After graduating from the University of Arizona with degrees in French and Psychological Sciences, she worked as a language assistant in Clermont-Ferrand, France through the Teaching Assistant Program in France. In Luxembourg, she spent the 2022-2023 academic year teaching English at Lycée Hubert Clément Esch-sur-Alzette and the University of Luxembourg. We sat down with Nicole to hear about her experience in the Grand Duchy. Q: “Has Luxembourg been what you expected? In what ways has life in Luxembourg surprised you?” “Luxembourg has been both similar to and different from how I had originally envisioned it. While I had an intellectual understanding of how small the country is, it definitely shocked me a bit in practice. I saw the same people often, even when I was least expecting it, and so it led to a sense of camaraderie between me and those around me. I quickly established a routine and […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Lunching in Luxembourg

The cultural differences I observed between the U.S. and Luxembourg can be summarized by a simple act: lunch. Almost every day, I eat lunch with my colleagues. I received a Fulbright Research Grant to complete a project on the gut microbiome at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH). I was grateful for the opportunity to expand my microbiology skillset, especially in a lab abroad. The bacteria I study help us digest our food, and the composition of our microbiomes is largely influenced by our diet. Therefore, lunch quite literally affects my research, but my lunches in Luxembourg were so much more than that.  When I first came to the LIH, I was overwhelmed. The plethora of languages that my diverse colleagues spoke, not to mention the lab jargon and foreign measurements, made me feel unprepared. I spent the first few weeks learning as much as possible and trying not to ask too many dumb questions. The only time I truly […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Charting My Year in Luxembourg

The best way to capture my Fulbright experience was presented to me on the first day of orientation. On September 15, 2022, 30 Fulbrighters, including me, sat in neatly-lined white chairs at the offices of the Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States, Belgium, and Luxembourg inside the Royal Library of Belgium. The Fulbright Program Officers presented numerous useful tips for living abroad in Belgium and Luxembourg – from how to set up a bank account in Europe to how to navigate public transportation. What I would come to find most useful, though, was a graph. This graph – albeit simplified – depicts the peaks and troughs, the shocks and adjustments, that one may experience while living 5,000 miles away from home. I found that my experience tracked the pattern of this chart. Arrival and Honeymoon On my flight from JFK to Brussels, I buzzed with excitement. I spent the past 1.5 years working on my application to serve […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2021, 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Lifelong Lessons Learned in Luxembourg

When I think back on the nine months that were my English Teaching Assistantship, I am appalled at the speed with which they went by. I think of the lessons I learned, both intentionally and a majority of them accidentally. Big and small. Easy ones and challenging ones. I remember the countless buses and trains. The sprints to catch them and the looks of defeat at missing them (both mine and those I saw as I sat by the window while we pulled off). I remember the language barriers, the feelings of unfamiliarity and the triumph when I understood that the cashier had asked me whether I was paying with cash or card in French. And more lessons. Daily, weekly, monthly lessons. Giving lessons while learning them. Like, lesson one (in case you’re ever in Luxembourg): bring the Öko-Tut! Öko-Tuts are these eco-friendly bags that you purchase at stores across the country and when the time comes to restock your […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Fulbright, Luxembourg

Embracing the moment

Perhaps the moment that best reflects my time in Luxembourg would be the night of my final Lëtz school. For a majority of my time in Luxembourg, my Wednesday night’s were spent within the walls of the monastery of the Brothers of Verbum Spei. Each week, the Brothers would welcome young adults to their home and present a seminar covering topics of philosophy and theology. Following the seminar, they would invite us upstairs to enjoy snacks, home made beers, and fellowship. It was a true community. When the night was ready to be concluded we would gather in their chapel to pray together before returning to our homes. During the closing prayer of my final Lëtz school the magnitude of the last nine months finally hit me. I remember as people left the chapel one by one I remained on the floor with tears in my eyes for the first time in a long while. Yet the tears were not […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2022, Americans in Luxembourg, Fulbright, Luxembourg

Trains of Thought

Over these last few months of my Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grant, I’ve been enjoying my commute to school, gazing out the window of my train as it zooms past the mountains, the rivers, and the farms of Luxembourg. But I can still remember my apprehension when I first learned that I would be traveling 63 kilometers (about two hours) on the train each way from my host city of Esch-sur-Alzette, in the south, to teach at a wonderful secondary school and an amazing primary school in the small town of Clervaux in the north, an area known for its historical significance as a site of heavy combat in WWII’s Battle of the Bulge. After crunching the numbers, I discovered that I was traveling across approximately three-quarters of the entire country each way.  Despite the long distance, over the nine months of the grant, I’ve come to savor these long train rides. The trains have not only transported me from […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2021, Americans in Luxembourg, Fulbright

Christmas with the Brothers

Over the course of the past several months, I’ve been fortunate to develop a relationship with the monks and seminarians of the order of Verbum Spei located in Esch-Sur Alzette. The connection began first between me and a seminarian from New Zealand named Jonathan over our shared struggle of being native English speakers living in Luxembourg. Each Sunday, I would make my way to St. Henri, on the northern side of town, struggle through understanding the mass in French, and spend 30 minutes afterwards talking to Jonathan. In October, the parish began weekly seminars on theological questions and there Jonathan would translate the talks for me. After the talks, I would get to spend more time conversing with members of the community and other Brothers. On Wednesdays, the parish held the young adult seminars with talks that were followed by the Brothers inviting us into their home to enjoy bread and their home made beer.  Following a mass in early […]

by Jasper Anthony
Posted on in 2019, 2020, Luxembourgers in America

Generals for breakfast and presidents for dinner

I still clearly remember my arrival in New Haven, now over a year ago. To give me the time to settle in and attend the Fulbright Orientation Gateway in New Jersey, I had arrived two weeks prior to the start of university. Exhausted after the long flight but eager to explore the city that was to become my home for the coming year, I wandered down Prospect Street. I started at the School of Management – one of the few university buildings with a modern architectural design – then headed downtown, going from one college to the next, strolling through their courts, and marveling at the Hogwarts-looking constructions.

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2019, 2020, Americans in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Finding a Home in Luxembourg’s University Choir

Through previous experience abroad and in college, I have found that joining a local choir is a quick and rewarding way to make some friends and raise your endorphins (which can be a rollercoaster of highs and lows when assimilating into an unknown environment). I did my research over the summer of 2018 and chose the University Choir of Luxembourg. It was a done deal after running into the enthusiastic and fabulously Luxembourgish François Carbon, the choir’s communications director, who also happens to be the Minister of Culture for the University of Luxembourg, at a lovely farmers market in the town square of Esch-sur-Alzette. We arranged for me to come to choir the following Tuesday and have a quick audition before the rehearsal. But before any of the singing could happen, I had to figure out how in the world to get all the way from the tiny southern village of Oberkorn to university campus at the north end of […]

by Fulbright
Posted on in 2020, Luxembourgers in America

To the most resilient class

The most resilient class: that is how the NYU community came to call my fellow students and myself during the virtual graduation ceremony. The speakers congratulated us for the resilience we had shown and encouraged us to stay resilient as we were navigating through our bar exams and the ensuing job search. At first, I shrugged, as I did not, and still do not completely, grasp how fast my experience in the U.S came to a grinding halt, even as I was watching my prerecorded graduation ceremony while sitting on my terrace in Luxembourg. With the ceremony a few weeks behind me, the bar exam registration guaranteed, and the fall internship confirmed, I believe that I am finally able to look back and to try to make sense of what happened. If it was indeed resilience that marked the last few months, I also felt emboldened by the memories that were present at every step and the strong community that […]

by Fulbright
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