Rigueur of the Germans, Joie de Vivre of the Belgians

The nature of my job means that I travel fairly extensively especially in continental Europe. It is rare for me to go to a country in that region that I’ve never been to before. However on Wednesday this week I made a flying visit to the city state of Luxembourg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg). I was fortunate enough to have a taxi driver on the Thursday morning who was a real Luxembourger (there are only 200,000 of them out of total population of only 500,000). He gave me a number of insights into the place including the fact that he would describe his country as being a mix of Germany and Belgium, and that the people were much more Swiss in nature than French. He said that the Luxembourgers were open to foreigners in most industries although the government of the country was off limits to non natives. Personal income tax was very low – around 10%, but the cost of living was high (poverty existed but it was “not the done thing” to talk about it no less show it). There are huge issues with a lack of accommodation and often young Luxembourgers are forced to leave their country of origin to find work because they can’t afford housing. He also explained how it was only over the last 20 years that the Financial Services industry has been built up thus reminding me of my recent trip to Singapore which is another young Financial Services driven city state. Overall it was a very interesting, albeit brief, visit. The good news is that the client meeting I had there with a major bank also went very well (they are nibbling on the Big Fish 1.0 bait). So with a bit of luck I’ll be going back, and maybe next time for more than 24 hours.