Above is a view of Luxembourg City, where I’ll be living for the rest of 2011, while I’m working at the LIS Cross-National Data Center. The glass buildings looming in the distance are the banking district of Kirschberg, with a medieval wall running in front of them; I think this captures the feel of the place pretty well. I’ll get back to writing about my usual obsessions presently, but this post reflects my scattered attempts to understand the nation I’m living in.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a peculiar little country — and coming from New York City, it’s a jarring transition. I’m still getting used to being in a place where everything closes by 9 PM (and nothing opens at all on Sunday), and where you actually have to look at a bus schedule before you try to get anywhere. Living with this slower pace of life kind of forces you to acknowledge that the sense of ceaseless life and possibility you get in New York is something of an illusion, made possible by the tireless work of innumerable low wage workers, who stay on the job around the clock so as to ensure that the city never sleeps. The low-commodification, shorter-hours, less wage labor kind of economy I often like to evoke would probably look more like Luxembourg. Still, the wine here is cheap and even the gas station sells great fresh baguettes, so I think I could get used to this pace of life. And of course, a lot of it is just a question of scale and density: the whole country has a population of barely 500,000, or roughly the same as Staten Island, and the capital city is less than 90,000.

Luxembourg is an especially strange place to be right now: it sort of feels like I’m in the eye of the hurricane of the European economic crisis. Daily life here seems calm and contented in one of the richest countries on earth, where GDP per capita is vastly greater than in the US and nearly three times the European Union average. According to the national statistical agency, the unemployment rate in 2010 was 4.5 percent, one of the lowest in Europe, and real GDP growth for 2011 is projected at a modest but respectable 3.4 percent. Though any economic data about Luxembourg should be taken a bit skeptically, since the majority of the country’s workforce is either foreign workers or “cross-border” workers who commute to Luxembourg from their homes in the surrounding countries.