Bonjour, Bouillon!

Freideg, 6 Mee.

Yesterday, as you probably know, marked Ascension Thursday. (Also Cinco de Mayo, but that's a story for another day.) As you might not know, Ascension is an official jour férié in Luxembourg ... meaning no work or school.

Although I've spent what feels like a lifetime on the train between Luxembourg and Brussels, I have not spent much time in the region of Wallonia itself. To take advantage of our time off and to get to know our northern neighbors a little better, my housemates and I decided to take a quick day trip to Belgium! We spent the day in the towns of Bouillon and Dinant. Our first stop was Bouillon, a historic town located just a few kilometers from the French border!

Bouillon is, by all accounts, pretty darn old. A castle has existed on the site since at least 988, which is -- just for context -- one thousand and one years before Taylor Swift was born. For most of the Middle Ages, the château fort de Bouillon belonged to the Ardennes-Verdun dynasty. The most famous of these lords, Godfrey of Bouillon, inherited his title from a childless uncle in 1082 and then sold the castle in order to finance his involvement in the Crusades. (As people did in the eleventh century, you know.)

Given its strategic proximity to France, Bouillon was nicknamed "the key to the Ardennes" by military strategist Vauban. He fitted the castle with state-of-the-art artillery and defense systems in the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bouillon belonged to France, to the Netherlands, and finally to Belgium. Click here to read more about the history of Bouillon.