Vienna International - Calgary International

Our flight home. Home, home -- to Calgary, Alberta. Home has been a bit of a fluid concept for us lately. Depending on the situation and conversation, home has come to mean:

a) Calgary, Alberta, Canada

b) 17 Syringasse 17/19 Wien (our apartment in Vienna)

c) whatever hotel room we happen to be staying in on our mini vacations

This is the day we actually came home. Canada is home!

Leaving the house just before 7:00 am. All of our stuff, and the help of our good friend Spencer.

Something Viennese people are very proud of, and we finally learned how to pronounce it.

Eric playing with the camera, and Katherine eating our very favourite yogurt from Vienna. Fun times in the airport!

We won't be exiting to Vienna again for a very long time.

Take off from Vienna International at 10:55am Vienna time.

Somewhere along the way we watched the sun set and rise (or rise twice, I'm not really sure) in a matter of just a couple of hours. It was beautiful.

We flew up and over Canada, through the arctic. It was really cool. I've never done that before. It was also beautiful.

I've never had to fill out customs papers before. Eric did them for us so that we didn't get stopped or arrested or anything crazy!

This thing entertained us the entire time we were in the air from Frankfurt, Germany to Calgary, Canada. We watched 4 movies, one of which I would only kind of recommend. If you're bored and looking to pass the time with a cute but not quite epic movie watch Larry Crowne. It was kind of fun. Do not under any circumstance watch: Contagion, Planet of the Apes, or The Debt. Dumb!

Landed at Calgary International Airport at 3:45pm our time -- after 13 hours of traveling.

Toilet Talk

Okay, so one of the strangest things we had to adjust to in Europe were the washrooms. Oh boy. That was a tricky adjustment. 

The majority of the issues went as follows: "I can't find a bathroom anywhere in this whole city. Oh I found one; what I have to pay almost a euro just to use it? I'll hold it. Okay, I can't hold it anymore, we have to find a McDonald's (they've always got one, and it's usually free). If we can't find a McDonald's we'll wait until dinner and take our chances at the state of that washroom."

Pretty much this happened on the daily (while we weren't at home). These are some of the most interesting we saw around.

Budapest, Hungary - Restaurant

Venice, Italy - McDonald's

Venice, Italy - Restaurant

Venice, Italy - Hotel Room (Eric loved it)

Verona, Italy - Restaurant (Katherine was not impressed)

Rome, Itally - Hotel Room (this was an interesting way to shower every morning)

Ckesy Krumlov, Czech Republic - on display in a Museum

Extraordinary Merry Christmas

It’s an extraordinary merry...
very, very, merry, merry Christmas!
Gonna stay with you til Santa grants my wishes.
Got my halo on I know what I want
It’s who I’m with.
It’s an extraordinary merry Christmas!

It's going to be a Christmas like no other. Some things are sad, but most are very happy. It's a very very merry merry Christmas because of it's extraordinariness!

Monday September 12th

K:
We've been here for about a week now and we are running out of clothes to wear. Finally the dreaded laundry day has arrived. 
We have no laundry in our apartment or in the building so it was a bit of adventure just to figure out where we were going to do it. When we moved in our landlord told us we could just wash some things here at home by hand in the sink, but bigger things we'll have to take out...HA you should see the size of our sink. That would be a funny thing to try sometime, but not when we're completely out of clothes. 
So we set out this morning in search of a Laundromat (which my WHOLE life I thought were called Laundry Mats, but if you google that it actually corrects it to Laundromat. I always thought that was a cheesy name that people named their Laundry Mats to be witty or cute). Anyway, we finally found one not too far from home. When we figured out how to work it all though (not knowing any German), we realized that each load to wash costs us 5euros! And the soap they provide you with smells like I would imagine freshly washed bed sheets in a hospital smell. Just strange and not like home. We will definitely buy our own for next time. Boy oh boy do we miss Mommy and Daddy's basement: where we could do free loads of wash with delicious smelling soap and leave the room without worrying about the clothes we're washing. 


Sitting still while our laundry moves around and around for what seems like hours:

Enjoying a good game of Mille Bornes (one of our very favourites) while we wait.

Enjoying a good snack while we wait. Verdict on this Austrian snack: Paprika chips are a success, a little like all dressed back home. Chocolate milk is very rich, almost like it's made from dark chocolate. Good, but not as sweet as home.

I love my husband. He keeps me entertained while we WAIT. 

Another handy little thing for while we wait: mobile internet. Being here for only 4 months we can't sign a contract for internet to have it set up at home so we got one of these USB stick things. It's kind of cool because we have the internet at the Laundromat, and where ever we happen to need it when we're lost or translating important things from German, but also kind of strange because we pay for it by the GB so we can't do things like watch videos or Skype or upload pictures to our blog posts unless we're at the school using their wireless internet instead. 
So about 12euros and 2hours later Eric and I finally have clean clothes! They smell strange and aren't really 100% dry yet but they are clean. We pack them up in our suitcase again and take them home where we hang every pair of pants, underwear and socks from any surface we could find in the apartment, until they're dry enough to fold up and put away (or until we wear them all and have to do it all again next week sometime). 
It was nice to finally get home this afternoon and get to shower and put on clean clothes. Isn't that just the very best feeling?

Orientation Week

Here are some things we're learning and seeing, and some things maybe you'd like to know and see as well. Some of what we know in Vienna so far. 
 
Living in Vienna is wonderful set of books (lent to us by the Morgans), from which we have learned everything we know, and will continue to pull all useful knowledge from. They are lifesavers and we'd be lost without them. I started to list some specifics we've found in here, but I just can't do it. You name it, they've got all you'd need to know about it. We love them. I know they will be talked about again, and they will be henceforth be referred to as "the Books".

Map of the Subway lines. We live off the U6.

These signs are almost like an oasis in the desert sometimes. This means that right below you is a U station, and it's helped us find our way a few times.

This is a speed limit sign. It means 30 kilometres per hour.

SPAR is the most economically friendly chain of supermarkets. There are SPAR, INTERSPAR and EUROSPAR stores. This one happens to be like 50m from our house. Also, you will never find one of these open later than 8 o'clock. That's one important thing you should know about Vienna. Everything around here shuts down really early. Most things at 6pm, and when you're lucky you can find stuff open til 8, but anything open after 8 is usually the kind of place you would never want to find yourself in anyway.

These (plus an Evian water bottle) are the only familiar things I came home with on grocery trip number one. PS I did not get Evian because I am a water snob, only because here in Vienna the big this is sparkling water. It's almost hard to escape it, and Evian was the only name I recognized and could be sure was still and did not contain alcohol.

That's another thing. Alcohol is everywhere! It's strange to not order a drink before or with dinner. They actually sell it right in the grocery stores all over. It takes up more space than juice and water usually.

A breakfast in Austria typically consists of bread, jam and coffee. THe selection of jam in the grocery store is virtuously endless. There is also a large selection of honey and spreads, like Nutella. There is hardly any peanut butter though.

This is the selection our grocery store has, and our's is a big one. That empty spot is for Skippy Peanut Butter, which have not tried yet because it's really expensive and hasn't been in stock the last few times we've looked. I miss Kraft :(
BIPA looks like a cute little cosmetics shop, but it's actually just a normal drug store. It'd be similar to a Shoppers Drug Mart in Canada, but without a pharmacy.


This is about the closest thing to plain white toilet paper we found in the grocery store. They have some of every colour, and we even saw one with a Hello Kitty pattern. Our bums will be grateful to get back home though because softness and comfort is not something they value here in toilet paper, as much as home at least.