Verdun
Visiting Three Countries in One Day
When I signed up for this maymester, my only knowledge of it was that I was studying abroad in Germany and fulfilling the third semester of Search. I didn't know until literally the day before we went on the trip that we'd be visiting France, and I didn't know until we got onto the bus to go to Luxembourg that we were going to Luxembourg. That's probably a lack of organization on my part, but it quite the surprise, and a good one! We went to Luxembourg first, specifically to the founding place of the European Union, which has been extremely relevant recently with the whole Brexit thing. Sadly, we didn't get to go into the actual museum, but they had a few monuments set up around the place, one of which is pictured below on the right. Each country that is a part of the EU gets their own little plaque with a flagstand in the corner for their country's flag; the one pictured is Germany's. As a bonus, they also had two sections of the Berlin Wall, pictured below on the left.
After finishing up in Luxembourg, we journeyed further westward into France, our destination Verdun, the WWI battleground. We toured the museum just a little ways off from the memorial. There was a WWI-era cannon placed outside of the museum, as pictured below on the right. The memorial is below on the left. It was all very humbling, and wild and crazy and weird that this was actually a place where countries collided; we don't really have anything anywhere near to what Verdun was in the US. The stahlhelm in the middle was the only thing I managed to snap a picture of inside the museum; they were rather stringent about no picture-taking.
In case you were wondering what the third country we visited was, I counted Germany as a country we visited as well, because visiting three countries in one day sounds cooler than visiting two countries in one day.