Ski week – now there’s a concept!
Wort columnist Dan Franch looks forward to ski week, or carnival week or whatever you happen to call next week’s holiday. Ski Week. What a concept, really. Five working days set aside each year with the underlying implication that people will spend that time skiing. I know it’s not the official name of next week’s […]
Welcome to the “Graynd” Duchy!
Stay-at-home dad Dan Franch invents a new weather term to sum up Luxembourg’s gray and rainy weather – “grayn”. It’s been a peculiar turn of years, the new one beginning as gray and rainy as the old one ended. The sky has been the color of an oyster shell, regularly leaking rain from a colander […]
Third Culture Kids
Third Culture Kids (TCKs). Does this term sound familiar? Sociologist Ruth Hill Useems came up with it in the 1950s as a way to describe children who grow up in a country (or countries) different from where their parents were raised. Military kids, international business people’s kids, and diplomats’ kids are the primary livers of […]
Sex on the to-do list
Life is busy. That’s for sure. Kids, work, errands, taking care of the home. Too often, the relationship with our partner becomes an afterthought amid the hustle and bustle of the daily grind. We let ourselves fall into patterns — uninspiring routines — and interaction becomes limited, especially when it comes to sex. While a […]
Let’s hear it for the U. S. of A.
“Hey baby, it’s the 4th of July” goes the chorus line of a song by X, an L.A. punk band from the 1980’s. Indeed it is. Also known as Independence Day, July 4th commemorates America’s liberation from that pesky British rule. The original Thirteen Colonies legally split from the Empire two days earlier and on July 4th, 1776 […]
You like potato and I like potahto
Accents. Everyone’s got one. Some of us have more than one depending on the language we are speaking or who we are speaking to. Here in Luxembourg, accents are an everyday occurrence. They are a signal to others expressing where we come from. Even if physical features make it difficult to ascertain one’s roots, once […]
20 to life
5 to 10. 10 to 20. 20 to life. If those numbers make you shiver a bit, they should. That’s prison talk for the amount of time someone will spend behind bars. It’s also somewhat reminiscent of the way Luxembourg’s expats sometimes speak when describing how long they have been here. „We came for three […]
Out to get you
Moving. It’s one of the more stressful situations in one’s life. Plenty of preparation goes into organizing, selling, and throwing out some of the past. Simultaneously, you’re searching, restructuring and planning for the future. It’s downsizing on one side; upgrading on the other. That all occurs before the move takes place. The actual relocation has […]
Safety in numbers
There’s safety in numbers. Any springbok or impala running from its predator will tell you that. Humans feel the same way. But it’s not just when we feel threatened that we like the company of others. In general, we are social creatures who enjoy interaction; with family and friends in particular. If they’re not around, we’ll […]
The Golden Cage
A golden cage; that’s how Luxembourg is described at times; alluring in some ways, suffocating in others – kind of like a celestial snare. A fitting description, I suppose, if you work here. But for those who play the role of house spouse – the trailing spouse in local parlance – the cage can become […]