Frohe Weihnachten!

That means Merry Christmas...which is what I am wishing for everyone from here in Austria.

Ok, you got me! That is actually Germany. Whatevs. BUT...The background might be Austria. Well, actually it's probably Switzerland. Geography is confusing in this neck of the woods.

Adventkranz...very typical here.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY,  JESUS! :)

If Amazing Race ever had a speed cookie decorating roadblock...

...I would be well prepared.


Once upon a time, my roommate wanted to make her mommy's famous Christmas cookies. Now as she was going to be teaching a lesson on Christmas to a bunch of really little children, she also wanted to bring in yummy decorated cookies for everyone in the class. 


She had all of the ingredients for the cookies and even did a test run earlier in the week. However, my favorite part of Christmas cookies was missing. 


At home, we decorate our Christmas cookies using this:

Too bad Austria hasn't gotten on that train yet.

Previously she bought what was thought to be colored gel frosting that turned out to be just food coloring under closer inspection. 

So my roommate, Mackenzie, was prepared to make homemade frosting instead. We went to the store for a few odds and ends. Before she finished getting her ingredients to make the frosting from scratch however, we found something we thought would make our lives easier.

This:

From the words and the picture on the label we thought, hey, this will do! Vanilla glaze for cakes. Sweet!

Oh how wrong a girl can be!

We came home and we (read: Mackenzie) began baking up a storm of delicious sugar cookies. 

The container of icing was in one giant solid block. This should have tipped us off. 

So we put it in a pot on the stove to heat it up per instructions because we are ohne Mikrowelle in this establishment. Fairly quickly the frosting/glaze stuff became the right consistency and was divided into three containers: two glass bowls and the original plastic container it came in. I mixed in green, red, and yellow food coloring into the respective bowls and felt we were all set for leisurely cookie decorating fun.

Look, my first decorated cookie of the 2011 Christmas season!

I am so calm and relaxed here. Not for long.

Things were going along nicely until I realized something strange was happening to the red icing. It was re-hardening! But just the red icing...curious.

We panicked and started decorating as fast as we could. Then it started happening to the yellow icing too!

So we said, "Screw it! Let's just use the green and do plain green Christmas trees for all of them."

And a few minutes later the green began to develop a weird consistency as well. Bummer!

"So much for easier," we thought.

So then I started taking the bags I was using to pipe the icing onto the cookies and running them under the SCALDING water from our sink. Which kinda worked. 

When that stopped being effective (because I couldn't get the icing hot enough without getting water in the bag or getting burned in the process), I resorted to sticking the two glass bowls of icing directly on the stovetop to reheat it. 

At this point we realized something. No matter what we did to reheat the icing, if we didn't work quickly it would happen all over again. Not only that, but the reheated red icing looked like some sort of oily congealed space goop.

So we went Henry Ford on those bad boys and formed an assembly line to knock out making something like 17 cookies in three minutes flat. 

Most of these are from before the icing meltdown...I mean, opposite of meltdown. In other words, these are the good ones.

Never would I have imagined I would hear "GO! GO! GO! WE CAN DO THIS!" while decorating cookies.

These are some of the cookies from the mass production lot. Sad, huh?

I guess there is a first for everything. 

Lesson learned: Living abroad sometimes requires one to be resourceful. However, said resourcefulness has varying results.

A Lesson in Free Time

I love doing nothing. Probably more than anyone should.


Seeing as how my life here is basically nothing but free time...no really, I barely work. I have found ways to fill the vast emptiness of my daily schedule.


Here is a guide should you ever find yourself with exorbitant amounts of free time, however unlikely that may be.


1. Watching an entire series of a television show that the locals are obsessed with.

2. Have a short-lived crazy obsession with really old seasons of Survivor. I may have watched three seasons in a matter of a week and a half. Whoops!

3. Read an entire book series EVERYONE SHOULD READ...twice.

4. Eat WAAAAAAAY more food than anyone looking to fit into a bridesmaid's dress in February should.

5. NAP. A lot. I even napped sitting up for 30 minutes in Vienna's Westbahnhof not too long ago. 

(picture not taken in Austria...but it's a classic)

6. Travel.

7. Write blog posts and read those of others.

8. Interrupt the daily lives of friends and family at home by incessantly calling them on Skype.

9. Drink: beer, wine, tea, hot chocolate, and/or Turkish coffee.

 10. Befriend local livestock.

If anyone has any suggestions of great time wasters, tv shows I should be watching, or books I should be reading...let me know!

Have you heard the one about 3 Americans, 2 Italian Train Stations, 1 Door, and the Angel?

So remember that time I told you I would tell you a story about these people?

and then didn't?

Here it is, finally. It's long. Sorry.

Once upon a time in a land not far from me called Italy...

I had visited my friend in Milan for the afternoon (old news) and ran to catch a train back to the Lake Como area where I was staying.

Here is what you should know about Lake Como: there are many many towns surrounding the lake itself. Pretty much only two have train stations, the one in Como proper being the bigger of the two. The other station is in a town called Varenna. "Station" might actually be a little too strong of a word for the train situation in Varenna. In fact, buying tickets is not something you can even do at that "station". You have to go down the street and around the corner to the travel agency (that you pray is open) to buy tickets and then make your way back to the tracks to stamp said ticket in a yellow box before hopping on a train that seems almost inconvenienced by stopping in such a small place overrun with tourists. 

Anyways, enough description of the train station.

So on my way home from Milan I ended up sitting next to a very nice older couple from the States. They were staying in Como for two weeks (I think...it's been a while now, details are fuzzy) making day trips and short overnight excursions to nearby cities in Italy. They were lovely. I know a lot of people my age wouldn't necessarily enjoy chatting up a retired American couple on an Italian train but I did. I like talking to people older than me sometimes more than people my own age. I think it has to do with the fact that they have stockpiles of cool stories and usually curse less than people in my peer age group. That is neither here nor there. Back to the story...

So after two separate hour long delays (Thank you, TrenItalia) on a normally semi-short trip from Milano to Varenna we got to know each other pretty well. I heard stories about their children and their lives which were really cool. For instance, one of their daughters used to be one of the few hand-picked flight attendants to the royal family of Saudi Arabia and lived years of extravagance flying all over the world, staying in the world's nicest hotels, eating the best food, being financially taken care of by the King, and meeting all kinds of people. Once the women of the royal family even treated the girls to a week at the spa and then had private designers make them gorgeous outfits just for them. Which I cannot lie, reminded me of Real Housewives when they went to Morocco. Now she works as a flight attendant for a private company and works very little and gets paid very well. 

We talked about everything you can imagine and they kept saying how proud my parents must be to have a daughter like me. They said how much getting out of the country and really living while you are young is the best investment you can make. Sufficient to say, when people have cool stories, clearly like traveling, and give self-esteem boosting compliments...I think the world of them.


The drawback to having such great conversation on an Italian train is that you stop paying attention to every stop. However, I knew the order of the stops by reversing them in my head from the trip into Milan earlier that day. Therefore I knew when we were getting close. 


When it came time for our stop, we got up and made our way to the door. I tried to open it. 


Nothing.


I pulled even harder...beginning to think I was just a weakling that needs bigger biceps for train travel efficiency. 


Still no.


Panic.


A guy is yelling at us in Italian from the seats pointing to the next car's door. We try to run to the next door as the train takes off again.


I don't know what to do and am mainly confused as to why the door wouldn't open. I later learned that some Italian trains have doors that don't open. How great is that?!?! No sign. I have traveled many times on Italian trains and have never had this problem. Bizarre. So FYI, the red handles on train doors that look identical to the blue or white ones in the other cars DO. NOT. OPEN. 

Something like this would have helped!

This was a problem for several reasons.
1. We didn't know how far it was to the next stop.
2. All I knew of the next stop was that it was in an even smaller town with no ticketing office or machine open and nothing available at that time of night on a Saturday.
3. The last ferry for the night that we were supposed to catch in Varenna would be leaving at 20:30 (8:30 p.m) and it was currently 19:50 (7:50 p.m.).
4. Almost no one on the train spoke English and sadly my Italiano is pretty much limited to niceties (Scusi, prego, per favore) and food related words pronounced much like Giada de Laurentiis taught me to.

I began to do the only thing I could think of...to find the conductor and ask him/her what to do. 


I left the American couple by the second door and ran to go find someone, mainly to figure out how to buy a ticket going the other way without someone thinking we were schwarzfahr-ing, as the English assistants in Austria like to say. 


However, about the time that I am about 5 or six cars from them the train comes to a stop at the next station. Crap!


I ran like the wind back to them just in time. We all decided to get off the train.


While I was running through train cars like an idiot, the American couple were panicking to a nice Italian lady about our situation. She said there was another train coming in the other direction but she wasn't sure we could make it due to the delays of our train. 


She was right. At that exact moment, we watched a train pull into the track opposite of us and pull away. We were then told that was the last train of the night. NO MORE. Until 6 am. No taxis to be found. Nothing, nichts, nada.


The nice Italian lady took pity on us though and told us in broken English to follow her. So we did.


She greeted her husband and I gather from listening to their conversation with my extremely limited Italian knowledge but good language ear/lots of cognates that we were three lost Americans who needed a lift.


Which, they provided all the way back to Varenna. Right to the ferry docks. They wouldn't take any compensation and gave us hugs and kisses on the cheeks telling us they were happy they could help. This reinforced a fact I have always believed. There are good people everywhere. Every time I travel, I learn this more and more. 


Thanks to our angel's super fast driving in a sweet Italian auto, we were even early for the last ferry and got a chance to stand around a very chilly Varenna at night and chat a bit more with my new friends, John and Liz. 


John even insisted, like a good grandpa would, that I wear his coat because I was shivering in my little sweatshirt.


We even had enough time to get a photo and swap contact info before taking the ferry across the lake back to Menaggio, where we all were staying. 


I like that a lot of times travel confusion leads to new friendships. 


John and Liz names get added to the long list of awesome people I have met traveling the rails of Europe. Their names have also been added to the list of people who are getting periodic postcards from me during my travels. 

Christmastime in Österreich

North America needs to get on the ball.


This part of the world has us totally beat on the Christmas front. Instead of stress and crowded malls, Austria (and Germany) offer the loveliest thing about the holiday season.


Christmas Markets

I have been to something like eight different ones now and have loved them all. Each one kind of has it's own special vibe, which makes each one fun to explore.


Of the eight I have been to, six were in Vienna. The big ones there are very touristy but still enjoyable as the lights and decor can't be beat.

(Note: I am sans camera these days...so I apologize for the iPhone pic quality of some of the following pictures) 

The deal with Christkindlmarkt:

1.) Get yourself a nice mug of Glühwein or Punsch (Basically hot mulled/spiced wine or punch type drink) to keep yourself warm while you walk.

(Hot Love Punsch, anyone?)

2.) Browse the local...and sadly not so local...wares of the many booths available.

3.) Buy said wares if you can find any that aren't ridiculously expensive (much easier in Lindau than Vienna).

4.) Check out the livestock on hand to entertain the market-goers.

4.) Munch on one of the many delicious food choices to be found all around the markets. They have something for everyone of both sweet and savory selections.

5.) Enjoy the lights and general merriment!

Hooray for Christmastime in Austria!!!

Grocery Store Game

I have this game I like to play. If you've known me for any length of time, I have probably told you about it.


I make up stories about strangers. All. The. Time. I do this walking down the street. I do this on the bus. I particularly like playing this game in airports on long layovers.


 Now, some people think you need to teach kids not to eavesdrop on conversations. I disagree. A great deal of creativity comes from eavesdropping, in my opinion. 


I observe some detail about a person and fill in the rest. Sometimes I'll give them names, occupations, relationships, problems, or plans. I listen to things they say and watch things they do and edit the story in my brain as things conflict. I know...I'm nuts. But it really is fun to me. I don't always talk about my made up stories if I am with someone...but they are still there. Sometimes they are elaborate. Sometimes very simple. It's really fun though. You should try it sometime.


Now I play a version of this in the grocery store that is a bit different. I like to look at the odd combination of things a person is buying and either think about what they could be making or just ponder the strange combinations.


Today I was doing this in the checkout line. The burly man in front of me had only two items. The first item on its own made me chuckle to myself. The addition of the second made my mind put a scenario together very quickly.

First item: 

These chips

(In case you can't read that...this flavor is called Chakalaka and tells you underneath that it has African seasonings)

Second item:

This book

(Tell me, what is Africa like?)

I really like to think this big burly man went to buy this book and then saw the chips and thought to himself, "Self, you know what would make my new book about Africa all the more enjoyable? These African flavored potato chips! That's what!"


or


He was buying the book as a present for his niece or nephew's African-themed 5th birthday party and was just trying to be festive.


or


He went for the chips and was so grateful for his favorite African flavored chips that he found the book and really took to heart that he should learn something about the place that gave him his favorite chips.


or


He teaches 7 year olds and is currently doing a unit on Afrika. 


Anyone else have any ideas?

Turkish Treatment for Homesickness

There are a couple things in life I like to think I am above. One of which being jet lag. Another of which would be cheap American beer from cans. Beer from cans in general, actually.


And lastly...Homesickness.


Every other conversation I have had with my landlady up until last week included the question "Hast du kein Heimweh?" (Are you not homesick?) And everytime I responded by telling her I don't really get homesick.


...up until last week


I know the stages of homesickness. I know about when it hits and that it manifests itself in different ways. I also knew if I were to get homesick it would fall on the fourth week of November. Isn't that ironic?


My homesickness wasn't missing home and wishing I were there and wanting out of this place. It was more of a week and a half long depression of no appetite, lots of sleep, crankiness for no reason, and one day and night consisting of something very strange which could be described as being in the same family of vertigo. I hate myself for sounding so dramatic right now. Unfortunately, I couldn't avoid it. I kept getting irritated or annoyed at every culture difference that normally I relish. Thankfully, I predicted it and could at least recognize this weird feeling fairly rationally. I knew in my head that I am happy here. I am living in Europe doing what I love. 


When I said that I had predicted this, I meant it. I knew if dirty homesickness was ever gunna get me, it would be the week of Thanksgiving. 


So one day when I was being a particular grumpfest, Mackenzie asked if I would go with her to the store. I didn't need anything and was just going because it was better than sitting around being Oscar the Grouch in my sweatpants all evening. 


She then said, "You know, I think there is a Turkish store over here." Again, I wasn't exactly in an exploring mood but went anyways.


My findings: If you are homesick in one culture... go to the market of another!


We had so much fun poking around the store and buying stuff that we weren't sure what exactly it was or what it would taste like. The music was awesome and things were pretty cheap, too!


I should add that the title of this post is not homesickness "cure"...just "treatment". But it did provide a quick relief from my irritation of not being in a familiar place at holiday time.


So what did we get???


All of this...

We make Turkish coffee 'round these parts nowadays.

And tea! Look at that whirling dervish on the front there. Not gunna lie, main reason I bought this brand.

The tea cups are new. The tea submarine is not...but it's still super cool!

The one in the middle tastes just like Sprite.

Little sesame cookies that I really like because they aren't actually very sweet.

I haven't tried these yet but they are cookies with strawberry jelly and what seems to be sprinkles. Can't be horrible.

And of course some Turkish Delight.

p.s. I promise I will tell you the story about the older couple from my Italy trip in an upcoming post. 

No worries!