LUXEMBOURG-VILLE — Amid battle cries and hastily composed text messages bidding goodbye to loved ones, a group of brave expats ventured into a neighborhood working-class bar.
The expats, who normally only go to trendy pubs where servers speak flawless English accented with just the right amount of irony and automatically slide you an imported IPA if you order a beer, made the split-second decision after missing the bus to the city center.
Bar owner Sandra Gomes says that she was preparing to close around 10 p.m. when someone used a stick to prop open the door. A young man in a wrinkled suit, with a tie wrapped commando-style around his forehead, crawled inside and evaluated the space before waving his friends inside.
“They creeped over to me and said nothing when I acknowledged them,” Gomes reported. “I assumed that they were deaf, so I wrote ‘what do you want?’ in several languages on a piece of paper, which I slid to the man I took for their leader.”
The three men and two women formed a huddle and deliberated in whispers and hand signs. They wrote “Do you have a dedicated G&T menu?” on the paper and returned it to Gomes. When she shook her head, they wrote, “Please give us five Manhattans with a 10-year-old bourbon.” She shrugged and offered them five glasses of Super Bock, which they reluctantly accepted.
Sources indicate that after promptly calling in for a rescue taxi and getting dropped off at an international bar in the city center that sells no cocktail for less than 15 euros, the group went over the details of their wild adventure, eventually convincing themselves that the working-class bar was not in nearby Rollingergrund but rather in a barren industrial zone near Foetz, was guarded by a mustachioed one-eyed bruiser with a pit bull, and only served homemade liquor made from lighter fluid and poisonous berries.
