I'm on the plane toward home, and leaving home. It's bittersweet as Luxembourgish chocolate, of which I've had my fill. "You must come back soon, monsieur," said the gentleman of the couple who run a head-spinning Luxembourg City gourmet shop, on my last day. "We have 100 percent coming in."
"One hundred percent cacao?" I said. "Is that even possible with chocolate?"
"No. But they do it." He lowered his voice to a near-whisper. "It is not too sharp, I promise you. Please come try."
Such was the welcome I received all over my sweet little second country and its vast German neighbor, with soccer and a new passport as my ins. As I departed the Hotel Grand Cravat, the elegant, excellent Albanian manager mentioned his immigration to the country, and how lucky I was that I didn't have to wait for naturalization. "Yes," I said, "but I'm not moving here, or coming to work. I'm retired."
"You will spend more and more time," he said. "It is my country now and it will be yours. Here you will be, as we say, doheem." I've learned enough Luxembourgish to know that means, at home. The passport is more than a novelty.
On the last day in the new-old country I meandered Luxembourg City with no itinerary, poking into shops and down side streets, trying to grasp that the world now considers me to be of this place. The line of the passport that gets me is "Nationalité: Luxembourgeoise." Mildly daunting too, as I've been cautioned that because of international law forbidding a nation from offering protection and aid to foreign citizens in their country, while I am within Luxembourg's borders the US authorities basically don't consider me American - I'm Luxembourg's responsibility. Not a big deal in a country as small and safe and wealthy as Luxembourg, but American dual citizens of other countries have had headaches with this.
I also have to do some unexpectedly complex passport-juggling from here on, as the airlines prefer to see the nationality where you're headed and immigration and security prefer to see the nationality where you are. For coming back to the US today I was advised in Luxembourg to show the US passport at exit because I had shown it on the way in. But the sudden existence of the extra nationality seemed to set off something records-wise at Frankfurt Airport, because I was "random" security-checked to the nines, albeit warmly - the new jacket of my new German soccer club lit up faces and drew exclamations from the small room full of German border security officials near my gate.
The final soccer match on Sunday in Mainz between Mainz 05 and Eintracht Frankfurt ended in a 1-1 draw on the field but was a rout in my heart. From the departure on the morning train I was reminded of all the reasons Mainz's city and club had grabbed me at the first match the weekend before, reasons the glamour of Eintracht at midweek had chased. The train carried me down the beautiful Rhine Gorge past Oberdiebach, a village near Mainz where multiple-great grandparents of mine lived for centuries. I was more of this place than of Frankfurt, which despite its proximity is on a different river in a different German state. Checking into my hotel room, as had happened the week before, I found alongside the Gideon Bible a Buddhist Dharma book, in German and English - Mainz, for reasons I have yet to discover, is thick with Buddhist centers, a delight for a Zen practitioner like me.
Leaving for the match, the stadium shuttles at the train station across from my hotel were mobbed with black-and-white-scarfed Eintracht fans. Having studied the transit system the weekend before I ran for a city tram instead, imagining Mainz fans would be drowned out in their own stadium by the big-city hordes. But despite their numbers - as a veteran of stadium reporting I would estimate at least one-fourth of the 33,000 spots were Eintracht territory, probably not one-third - there seemed to be little animosity between the sides and a lot of good-natured ribbing, a stark contrast to the profanities and middle fingers from Stuttgart fans I witnessed sitting for a half in the Hertha Berlin section. "Full, full, you have to walk!" shouted the Mainzers in my tram as Eintracht supporters tried to cram in. "Do you want to see the match in an empty stadium?" a Frankfurter shouted back, drawing laughter from all. In the stadium, the Eintracht fans made enough of a racket, but the Mainz fans and their wall of sound from the ultra section easily surpassed them. By halftime I was cheering reflexively and all-out for Mainz, and by the time I arrived at the post-match hangout I'd adopted the week before, a venerable bar called Zur Andau, I was clad in new Mainz gear.
At Zur Andau I got a beer-soaked final send-off from an amalgam of Mainz and Eintracht fans. The question of whether I could support Eintracht as my "second club" sparked a hot debate. Older fans, being from an era when Mainz was a small club and rarely played Eintracht, seemed to think it was fine, that there was no longstanding rivalry between the two neighboring teams, which was how it had appeared at the stadium. This seemed to horrify younger fans, who complained that this was the problem with Mainz since becoming a bigger club: too friendly with everyone, no one's enemy. I ventured how impressed I was with Eintracht Frankfurt's wooded Waldstadion, and a young woman in a Mainz shirt yelled, "Don't go in that forest! They pee in there!"
Now it is time to be happily home with house and husband, who is next on the list for a Luxembourg passport, a couple of years from now, relieved I'm sure to have been without a travel permit for a 12-day trip with five soccer matches in it. One club should be enough from here on. And two countries.
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