Retz

Posted on October 29, 2011 by admin

Today we took the train to a very small town called Retz, which is apparently world famous for its Pumpkin Festival. It was a long train ride which took us well beyond Vienna — we were about 5 km from the Czech border when we arrived at the Retz train station. We had a great time at the Am Himmel festival last weekend, so we thought we’d give this one (which was supposed to be bigger) a try as well. From Retz, we took a shuttle bus (three fully loaded tour buses ran every hour) to Obermarkersdorf.

It was certainly bigger. There were nearly 60 shops, kiosks and food stands, several marching bands, a couple of regular bands, floats, a carousel, a bouncy house (actually, a bouncy fire station), a pumpkin maze and (according to the brochure) over 1000 carved jack-o-lanterns (I think that’s a very conservative estimate).

The town is darling. It’s the epitome of a little Austrian town, with narrow winding streets, cute little homes and a stream running through the middle, crossed by several footbridges. In this case, the front yard and windows of each home was adorned with a pumpkin scene. The theme this year is “around the world” so each home chose a country or region of the world and decorated based on that theme. Some of the displays were stunningly elaborate. We saw the North Pole, the Orient Express (accompanied by pumpkin Japanese Lanterns), the Loch Ness (Pumpkin) Monster, a bull and a matador, the Eiffel Tower, a pumpkin blacksmith who was actually moving, a massive pumpkin pyramid, a very long pumpkin train, and a pumpkin gondolier along with his pumpkin customers — all of whom were actually in a gondola, floating in a pond.

We met up with some friends on the way, and some more when we got there, and together (and separately) tried a variety of fun (and, in most cases, pumpkin inspired) dishes. My favorites from today were small apple/pumpkin fritters, coated in powdered sugar, and also the pumpkin cappuccino. We also successfully scoured the festival for another jar of pumpkin seed pesto (because the jar we purchased last weekend is already gone).

Benjamin and I took part in several of the kid’s activities — we got through the pumpkin maze (actually a hay bale maze with pumpkins) easily and then decorated a glass lantern which we then lit and carried through the festival, hanging from the stroller. (Yet a few more for the long list of things you’d never do in the States: decorate a glass lantern with a 3 year old, light a lantern for a 3 year old, attach said lantern to the stroller and walk through a festival crowded with people.) Decorating the lantern with B was fun (he opted for lantern making over pumpkin carving) and we’ll be keeping it to use for trick or treat . . . or just late night trips in the wagon. (Liam, unfortunately, chose the time when we were in the kid’s section to sleep, so he missed out on that part.)

We had a great time. We saw lots of fun things, we ate good food, we hung out with fun friends, we did fun activities . . . and then it was time to go home. We caught the shuttle bus back to the train station . . . and then discovered that we had over an hour wait for our train. In the cold. With two kids. Who didn’t get real naps today. And were hungry.

But, amazingly, we finished our day with a great hour in the train station and a nice ride home. At the train station, Benjamin made a few friends (some adults and another kid), showed off his speed and spinning ability, and challenged the other little boy to several races back and forth. Liam practiced his walking. Once on the train, Liam took a good nap with Dan while Benjamin and I talked about our day and looked at the pictures we took. In all seriousness, the grumpiest person at the end of the day was me. My kids were amazing. They enjoyed the day enthusiastically and kept their good spirits throughout. I am amazed and impressed by them.

Retz’s renown for putting on a good Pumpkin Festival is well deserved. We all had a lovely day in the Austrian countryside and we’re all feeling thoroughly festive and geared up for Halloween.

Danke, Amigo!

Posted on October 28, 2011 by admin

There are a lot of things we’re hoping to take from this experience of living abroad — memories of travel throughout Europe, the calm confidence that comes from having conquered a massive challenge, the perspective that comes from living out of your comfort zone. And, for the kids (if not also for us) hopefully a little bit of German speaking ability.

With Benjamin being in school, I imagine that he, at least, will leave here with a good working knowledge of German. As he gets more comfortable at school, they’ll be phasing the English out and the German in, and I’m confident that he’ll pick it up. It’s amazing to me how much he’s learning already.

As much as TV is maligned when it comes to toddlers and preschoolers, I actually have to give the shows we’ve been watching a lot of the credit so far. Probably about half of the TV that Benjamin watches in a day (and he probably averages about 3-4 hours per day — I know, that’s a lot) is in German. Much as I am sheepish about the amount that he watches, I can’t deny that he’s learning something from it. He will often recite words in German that I recognize solely from the TV he watches, and he’s now showing a preference for the shows that are in German — he’ll even ask me to change the soundtrack on many of his favorite English language shows to German.

In fact, he’s picking up a surprising variety of language from TV. In addition to the German, he’s learned several words of Chinese from “Ni Hao, Kai Lan” and he’s learning Spanish from “Diego”. So far, though, his mental categories of language include “English” and an “other” that can be called German, Spanish or Chinese but which consists of all the same words. In other words, he comfortably mixes words he’s learned from each language together, and even gets frustrated with the inconsistency — the other day, he sternly told Diego on TV that the word for “pull” isn’t “jala” (Spanish) it’s “la” (Chinese).

Just today, he was telling one of his toys, “Danke, Amigo!” Not only was it impossibly cute, but it makes me hopeful for his future linguistic understanding. He’s only 3, but with learning things like this, it’s an advantage. What a souvenir to take with him when we go home — not just the ability to speak and understand German, but the confidence that it will give him to go out in the world.

The field trip that wasn’t

Posted on October 27, 2011 by admin

Benjamin’s class went on a field trip today. They took a bus to a farm and picked out pumpkins. I’m sure they had a great time, but I wouldn’t know: Benjamin didn’t go — he stayed home with me, instead. When his teacher first brought it up to me last week, she explained about the trip, and then immediately suggested that B not participate. Her thought was that, since he’s just now starting to be enthusiastic about being at school, they were worried that a trip away from the school, without either of his parents, might prove to be traumatic to him and undo the progress we’d made. Although I completely understand her perspective, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad — his first school field trip, and he was uninvited.

Benjamin, however, shared none of my sadness. After leaving school that day, I asked him if he wanted to go to the farm with his class. He said no. He said he wanted to stay home with me for the day — which was absolutely fine with me. I’m more than happy to have him home, but if he had wanted to go, I would have done everything I could do to make it happen (offer to go along and chaperon, offer to travel separately and meet them there). As it turns out, though, every time it was mentioned in front of him (like on Tuesday, when I was confirming the date with the teacher) he would look at me and ask, “Am I going to stay home with you?” and when I assured him he was, it would make him happy.

So, today, we stayed home: Benjamin, Liam & I. We had a quiet day. I’d had thoughts of gonig out, doing something special, going to a park or on a trip of our own, but it was chilly and threatened rain all day (which only materialized for a few short moments). Instead, I bought him the Disney Pixar “Cars” movie on iTunes and we watched that together (twice). He loved it. (We went to see “Cars 2” in the movie theater, but hadn’t seen the first one yet.) We all curled up on the couch, or on the floor, had snacks, watched movies and read books. It was a good day. I got to be with both of my boys today, and that’s better than a field trip to me.

Dinos!

Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin

Today is the National Holiday in Austria. It’s a national day of rest (nearly everyone takes off of work) but it’s also a day to learn about and celebrate all that Austria has to offer: the Parliament and the National Library hold Open Houses, the military displays some of its major equipment on the lawn in front of the Hofburg, and many of the museums have discount admissions to encourage people to come out.

Well, it worked — people were out and about, all over Vienna, enjoying the city and taking full advantage of the tours and discount admissions. Dan had off of work, and Benjamin’s school was closed, so we decided to do something fun (and discounted) as a family: we went to the Natural History Museum to check out their recently reopened (and rumored to be excellent) dinosaur exhibit. On the way, we walked past the Parliament (which had a tremendous line out the door of people waiting to get in to see it) and when we arrived at the museum, there was a long line, outside in the rain, to get a ticket and get in. We waited, and got our tickets and went inside, where it was even more packed (I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a museum so populated).

The exhibit was fantastic — Benjamin and Liam were thrilled. The exhibits were impressive, from skeletons of a giant prehistoric armadillo and a humongous Diplodocus, to the skulls of a Tyrannosaurs and a Triceratops, to a model of a Pterodactyl and a Tyrannosaurus, to a fantastic animatronic Allosaurus. It was great. When the Allosaurus model started moving and roaring, Benjamin got very worried and decided that he wanted to go home (until I explained that it was 1) a robot and 2) attached to the table it was mounted on — then he decided it was pretty neat). I, personally, learned a lot about Ichthyosaurs. Liam had a great time checking everything out and patting the model of the Woolly Mammoth.

We had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I noticed that the descriptions on the exhibits (which, luckily, were in English as well as in German) had a very different tone here than I’m used to at home. Here, things are stated much more absolutely — the layer of soil deposits is “proof” of a meteoric extinction event (at home, I think they would have said, “strongly supports” or “is evidence of”). Here, there is no “theory” of evolution — it’s just stated as fact. There is much less equivocation — much less concern about being politically correct (which shouldn’t surprise me, really, after having lived here for 6 months).

On the way home, we went by the Hofburg and checked out some of the military equipment. B was fascinated, and really enjoyed getting to climb on everything — he and Dan even waited in a REALLY long line to get to go inside of a portable radar vehicle, which turned out to be his favorite part of his day. The highlight for me, though, was watching both of my boys be amazed and impressed by the dinosaurs — finding out that they were real, and not just something from cartoons and tv. It was a great Nationalfeiertag!

Austrians and elevators

Posted on October 25, 2011 by admin

On the whole, Austrians are courteous, helpful and generally polite when I encounter them out in public. People seem to generally do what they’re supposed to do (throw their trash in the trash cans, sit where they should on the train, give up their seat to someone older or less able than themselves, hold doors, cross at crosswalks, etc.).

The example I get to experience, frequently, is how helpful they can be with a stroller. The trains are generally set up to work well with strollers — there’s designated stroller parking areas on the trains, and doors that are marked which are stroller accessible (generally, but not always, they’ll even accommodate our double stroller) and all of the underground trains are accessible by elevator.

Every so often, though, an elevator might be out of service. And although I prefer to travel up and down by elevator, I will use an escalator in a pinch — but not every station has an escalator going down, and often the staircase is too long to try to manage a stroller on my own down a flight of stairs (what’s possible isn’t always safe). And some of the trams and out-of-town trains have several steps up to get inside. Both can be difficult, if not impossible, to manage with a stroller. 100% of the time that I’ve run in to a difficult situation I have had one or more complete strangers offer to assist by helping me carry the stroller up or down the stairs, helping us on or off the tram or helping us carry excess stuff that isn’t easy to manage on an escalator. (I had one particularly memorable situation where I had Liam in the stroller, B on his bike and the elevator was broken. I had no idea what I was going to do — I simply didn’t have enough hands to get everyone safely up the escalator. But then a woman who had just come down the escalator I was trying to go up stopped and offered to help. She carried the bike while I managed the stroller and Benjamin — and she even missed her train to do it.) This kind of kindness is a normal part of daily life here in Vienna. I’m still a little surprised when it happens, but people generally count on it, and it is incredibly reliable. I am incredibly grateful for this help when I need it, and truly impressed by the culture of responsibility and thoughtfulness that has created it.

But this leaves me all the more perplexed by the behavior I see regarding Austrians and elevators. Every single day, I see people go out of their way to walk to take an elevator when they could, more easily and more quickly, have taken an escalator or the stairs. They will wait for the elevator to come (the elevators here aren’t usually very fast) and pack themselves in. There are signs on the elevators stating that priority is to be given to strollers, people in wheelchairs, and the elderly, but no one seems to care. I have, on several occasions, been pushed aside so that seemingly fit people can take the elevator that they had to walk out of their way to get to. (I’ve seen wheelchairs pushed aside, too.) Generally, the people here don’t shrink away from physical activity, and the sense of courtesy and responsibility seems so strong that I just can’t make sense of this one weird little thing. It just seems so out of character based on everything else I experience here, but it’s also remarkably pervasive. (I wonder if it’s related to the dislike of waiting in lines that seems to be common here, too.)

I am impressed and amazed by the amount of kindness and help I’ve gotten here when I need it — it’s part of what made my mind up to move here when the opportunity came up. The strangeness with the elevators doesn’t undo that — it’s just a piece of the puzzle that I don’t understand yet (and there are still a lot of those).

Happiness is a Spider-Man umbrella

Posted on October 24, 2011 by admin

Benjamin saw it in the window of a shop down the block, and he’s been talking about it ever since. It’s a clear, plastic child’s umbrella, featuring Spider-Man. He fell in love with it.

He doesn’t have any particular affinity for Spider-Man — in fact, I think this may be his first exposure to the concept (he’s been calling it the “spider umbrella” — I think it’s the spider part of the design that attracted him). But, since the first time he saw it, he’s been asking us for it. I asked him if he’d rather us find him a Lightning McQueen umbrella (which is his current favorite character), but he said no, he’d actually prefer “the spider one”.

The truth is, an umbrella is a pretty reasonable purchase for him (I just bought myself one, as too) since he’s out, back and forth to school, every day. Besides, we wanted to indulge him. His asking (very sweetly, with lots of “please”s) over and over was actually really cute — he managed stay persistent without getting annoying.

So today, after school, we went and got it. I had completely forgotten, but the second I touched, heard and smelled the plastic, I remembered exactly the sensation of holding a plastic umbrella as a little girl. I used to have one just like it (not with Spider-Man, though — my mom remembers it as Hello Kitty).

He is thrilled. He carried it all around the store, all the way home, and around the house for a while. He was so excited to show it to his Grandma on Skype today, and then to Daddy when he got home from work. Later this evening, when he went out with Dan, to pick up dinner, he took it with him (it was raining, so it got its first real use). It was so much fun for me, too, to get it for him. It’s fun to be able to spoil him sometimes (and I’m so glad to be able to do that).

Wearing a hat

Posted on October 23, 2011 by admin

I live in Austria. I don’t have a car, I go out every day (rain, shine, cold or wind) at least to pick up Benjamin at school. It’s only October, and we’re already below freezing in the mornings. I can’t avoid it any longer: I need a hat.

I do own a few hats — wooly, winter hats, built for warmth rather than appearance. At home, that was fine, since I hardly ever wore them unless I was bundled up to go out in the snow with the kids, or out to the barn with the horses, and in either situation, function outweighs form in terms of selecting apparel.

But, with my new location, and the inevitability of it becoming more a daily accessory, I want to do better — I want to do what I can to find something warm and cute. It’s a challenge.

Vienna has many specialty hat stores. Hats are a ubiquitous item here, and people also like to be fashionable, so there are lots of options. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, I get to try on a lot of different things: if I don’t like the first thing I see, that’s no problem — there are dozens of other choices. On the other hand, there are dozens of choices and I really have no idea what I’m looking for, and that makes it a little overwhelming.

I went to the closest hat store (located on my block) and threw myself on the mercy of the first English speaking shopkeeper I found. She was great — she asked me about my winter coats, about where and how often I’d be wearing a hat, and made a few suggestions. I tried them all on, and felt silly with every single one. Why is that?!? I see other people wearing hats, all the time, looking cute — looking warm and fashionable and as though wearing a hat is a totally normal thing. Each one I put on looks like part of a costume, or like it belongs to someone else and I just stuck it on to keep from being frozen. The ones that I like the best on the shelf look the most ridiculous on me, the ones I liked the next best made me look like I’d borrowed something from an elderly person and the ones I like the least turned out to be the least offensive when I actually put them on my head and looked in the mirror.

I still felt silly, though. It still feels like playing dress up in something that belongs to someone else. I narrowed it down to my favorite three choices, and then asked my new hat sales clerk friend for an opinion. She picked the one I was the least drawn to, but I went with her idea (she is a professional, and she looks at people in hats all day long — AND she was honest with me about some less than attractive choices I tried). It’s warm, but it’s BIG (apparently, it’s fashionable). I feel silly when I put it on, but I’m glad my head is warm. My hope is that I’ll get used to it, and that maybe, as the winter goes on, I’ll grow bolder and more comfortable with the idea of a hat, and maybe even be able to bravely experiment with other styles. If I need to wear one every day (and if I need it in October, I imagine it won’t really be an option in January) I’m hoping I can find something that I really like — and maybe become one of those cute hat wearing people, too.

Kurbis Fest

Posted on October 22, 2011 by admin

We’re not exactly sure how they celebrate Halloween here in Austria, but it’s definitely different than back at home. We’ve had pumpkins available to buy in the grocery stores for weeks now (just like at home) but they come pre-painted. There are a lot of pumpkin and scarecrow decorations to be found around, but very little else — no black cats, ghosts or witches, no vampires, bats, mummies or monsters. There aren’t bushels of trick-or-treat Halloween candy for sale at the stores. The focus seems to be on the harvest, on pumpkins, on the season. It isn’t a bad thing, just different.

We don’t know what to expect as we come up to Halloween. Benjamin is old enough to look forward to it, so we’ve been trying to come up with our own way to celebrate (we’ve heard rumors that there are neighborhoods that do host trick-or-treating, but we don’t know for sure, and we also want there to be a “season” to it, not just a night of candy-induced hysteria). It’s actually been a little hard to do — at home, you’d be able to go pumpkin or apple picking from mid-September, go on hay rides, shop and plan for Halloween costumes. We can’t find costumes anywhere (my mom is sending over some of mine and my brothers’ from when we were kids) and we haven’t been able to find any “Halloweeny” activities to participate in at all . . . until this weekend.

This weekend was the first of two Kurbis (Pumpkin) Festivals in Vienna. (There may be more, but my semi-extensive internet research got me information on two.) First thing this morning, we headed out on the Strassenbahn, and then the (very crowded) bus, up to the top of one of the hills overlooking Vienna, up to Am Himmel. It was chilly, and we got lost on the way. But it was FANTASTIC.

It was everything we’d been missing about celebrating fall. It was sunny, cool and beautiful. Benjamin chose pumpkins for himself and Liam — we could have carved them there at the festival (they had specialized scooping and cutting tools and everything) but Benjamin wanted to wait until we got home (and honestly, they were cleaner and easier to transport whole). Benjamin and I built and flew a kite together (with help from a VERY kind assistant who translated the German instructions for us). We drank cider, ate pumpkin soup and fresh bread, sampled pumpkin cream liquor, selected some local ham, ate langos (a kind of fried bread with pumpkin seed pesto and a lot of garlic) and enjoyed some warm apple wine. Benjamin played on an extensive playground, Liam practiced his walking (he’s not so good off road yet — he kept getting hay wrapped around his legs and trying to fall down).

Enjoying all that autumn had to offer, I couldn’t help but miss my family a lot. We all really enjoy the fall and preparing for Halloween, and I wish we could have all been together today. (Although I did feel very connected with them all — especially my Dad while building the kite — throughout the day.) We enjoyed the beautiful day, we played and ate and drank outside, and then, chilly and a little chapped from the wind, we walked back down the hill, climbed onto the bus and headed back home. It was a good day. And next week, if we want to, we can try another kurbis fest. Hooray for fall!

Hot chocolate at Michaelerplatz

Posted on October 21, 2011 by admin

The last few nights at our house have been rough. Liam is teething again, and Benjamin was having strange (and apparently unpleasant) dreams about Elmo and Grover being at our house, which had something to do with us having to move. So, we were ALL up a lot the last few nights. I managed to sleep in a little bit this morning (thank you Dan) but it was still one of those weird days where I can’t quite seem to get anything to happen the way that I want it to and I somehow make it to 4:30 in the afternoon without having done any of the things I intended to get done.

It being Friday, this concerned me less than it might have on another day (because having one of “those days” at the end of the week doesn’t tend to spiral into the following days, thus leading to one of “those weeks”). But still, I wanted to at LEAST get my walk in for the day, so around 4:30 this afternoon I started to get the kids changed, dressed and out the door for a walk. We made it out by 5:00, Dan was due home by 5:45 and I was wondering if it wasn’t just a silly thing to try to accomplish with my day.

I’m really glad we went. I walked, Liam rode in the stroller and Benjamin rode his bike. It was chilly, but really lovely — we made it out in time to still have a little sunlight to enjoy the beauty of Vienna. I didn’t get a lot of exercise in — Benjamin was easily distracted today, and the dark was closing in quickly — but I really enjoyed a nice time out with my boys.

Heading back, we came through Michaelerplatz. It was just getting to be dusk, and the chilly air was starting to creep in. We went past Starbucks, and I couldn’t resist — I took the boys in for hot chocolate (really, just for me and B, Liam just got a little whipped cream). We sat outside and watched evening come on. It got darker in the square — the carriage drivers lit their lamps, the cars and bicycles turned on their headlights, and the streetlights came on, one after the other, in front of the Spanish Riding School. Benjamin proudly carried, and drank, his hot chocolate all by himself.

We sat, and talked about our day. I wrestled Liam (who desperately wanted to get down and walk around on the cobblestones). Dan got home and walked down to meet us. I love these moments with my kids — when we share something completely ordinary, yet very special. Going “to a cafe” (as Benjamin explained it) and having hot chocolate, together, on a chilly fall day, is pretty special. Doing it in the heart of Vienna makes it magic.

Der Zahnarzt

Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin

I haven’t been to the dentist since January. I’m a bit of a nut about oral hygene, and my teeth were starting to feel icky, so I just couldn’t leave it any longer — it was starting to get to me. So I found a dentist, and today, I went.

This is another one of those experiences you just won’t have as just a tourist or a visitor to another country — even going somewhere as a foreign exchange student, for an entire school year, you could probably manage to do routine dental (and any other) visits during school vacations, or to go just before you left and then wait to go again until you get back. Visiting the dentist is one of those things you only do in a foreign country if you live there (or have some kind of dental emergency).

Visiting any type of doctor here is a little weird. At home, I’m used to a dentist (or any kind of doctor) having their office in an office park or some kind of medical center. Here, the doctor’s and dentist’s offices are mixed right in to residential buildings. Not, as you might see in the States, on the ground floor of a residential building, but in just any building, on any random floor, next door to regular apartments. As such, you have to get buzzed in to the building, and then again to the office unit . . . and you ride up in the elevator along with the building’s residents. This afternoon, on the way to the dentist, for example, I rode up in an elevator full of young women, laden with beer, having a party, I presume. There was just something odd about getting off on the same floor, and going in to the neighboring apartment . . . to have my teeth cleaned. (I should be used to this by now, really, since there is a doctor who has her office downstairs from our apartment, and she appears to ALSO live there, which I also find strange.)

Going in to it, you don’t know what to expect. Do they do things the same way here? Will my teeth be taken care of? Do these people know what they’re doing? Will I be able to communicate with them? Have I rotted my teeth out on coffee and pastries over the past 6 months?!? For all the strangeness of the office location, and the nervousness and anticipation, the actual experience of getting my teeth cleaned was pretty much the same. The dentist was nice, the hygienist was nice. The dentist is originally from California, so there’s no language barrier there (although living in Vienna for 10+ years gives him a very strange accent) and the hygienist, who is Austrian, spoke English very well, and got assistance from the receptionist when she got stuck (she told me she was going to “shower” my teeth, but knew that wasn’t right . . . the receptionist looked it up for her, laughing — the word she was looking for was “rinse”).

It was a fine experience, and my teeth are clean. I admit I miss my dentist and hygienist from home, though. But this is definitely one of those things that I kind of took for granted at home that I’m not sure I will again. And it’s another one of those moments that reminds me that I’m not just visiting.

A Mommy Abroad

Our big adventure, as a family of three.

Category Archives: Adventure in Vienna