Over the long Easter weekend, I visited  Belgium and Luxembourg.  (Those posts are coming soon.)  The night before I returned to Regensburg, I heard a bunch of people shouting across the street, in front of the main Luxembourg City train station.

At first, it was just a small group of people, jumping up and down and cheering.   Soon, the group got larger though.  Much larger.  There were drums, and foghorns, and people honking their horns as they drove buy.

After a while, the crowd became so large that they started to spill into the street.   Traffic was blocked.  The celebrants were using flares and vuvuzelas.   The police saw the size of the celebratory crowd and started to detour traffic around the area.

The volume of the cheering and the horns and the vuvuzelas and the drums was so loud that I could hear it from the interior hallway inside the hotel.   By this point, my curiosity was impossible to ignore, so I went downstairs to take a closer look.

I stayed across the street, ready to duck back into the hotel if necessary-  even though this was a happy, celebrating crowd, it was still a fairly giant mob.  I found out once I was downstairs what the celebration was about-  Sport Lisboa e Benfica, a Portuguese sports group, had just won a major championship game.

As it happens,  there’s a pretty substantial Portuguese community in Luxembourg City.   They stayed on the street cheering and honking and generally being a giant crowd for about three hours.  By quarter to midnight, the last vuvuzela finally wandered off and by midnight it was quiet enough to get some sleep.

Here’s a few pictures from the celebration.  I’ve shown these to a couple of people and the overall impression I’ve heard is that this actually looks like a riot.  It wasn’t, though- it was a celebration.  These people were happy.  

Have you ever seen a celebration like this firsthand?