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If you´re looking for a little laugh, I suggest heading over to the Virtual Tapas Bar for the lyrics to a song about a meet-up of ex-pat bloggers. It was all I needed to feel less isolated this morning.
My limited hunting has failed to locate any American ex-pats blogging from Austria.
Anybody know of any? My European adventure began in Austria and I used to be a pretty big fan of pretty much all things Austrian. I am now coming to terms with the fact that my children will be “piefkes" and liking the fact that my accent is no longer that different than that of the people around me.
I will also be closely watching this discussion over at EuroTrippen. It is the never-ending ex-pat struggle.
My mom lived in Germany in the 60´s, and at the time, the only place one could buy peanut butter was in the “Reform Laden”, which surprisingly enough is not a detention center or juvie or similar, but Granola Central, the health food store. In a fit of ex-pat-think, my mother went back to the health food store figuring that if they had peanut butter, they might also have another American product she was looking for – wait for it – marshmallows! She got a lecture on healthy eating, on Americans and their diets and on her foolishness generally before she was permitted to once again go on her way.
it is the moment I have been waiting months for. Armin Assinger’s “köstliche” commentary to the Olympic men’s downhill in which the gold was snatched at the last moment by the French Deneriaz has finally made it to youtube where the whole world can see it. During the Olympics, the clip was only viewable in Europe, so I coudln’t share it with family.
One doesn’t normally see the sports reporters, but they showed this clip on the Harold Schmidt late night show and it became something of an instant classic. Even if one doesn’t understand what’s being said, there is nothing like seeing him covering his eyes as it becomes apparant that the Austrians won’t be getting the gold. Assinger is a former skier himself, and he brings more dialect and color to the broadcast.
I can’t get enough of Assinger’s less professional 
approach to commentary and we always watch skiing on ORF instead of ARD.
One more time because it feels so good -
” Der Deneriaz foat wia a gsengte Sau ! “
Ok, here’s a second try at posting the pictures from last weekend’s romp to the north! We had a lovely time visiting friends, and I very much enjoyed hanging out with Jakob, the 1 1/2 year-old, who thought I was pretty cool.
Job hunting, everyone is constantly telling you that you have to know what you are good at. My encounter with Jakob was both heartening and a little depressing. I am generally good with kids – individuals, not large groups and with people generally. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of thing you can write on a resume and the experience, like reading “What Color is Your Parachute” in German, knocks me for a loop because I probably invested my entire academic life in an area other than that in which my natural talent lies.
I always got ansers back assessment tests in high-school telling me that I should become a stewardess or something similar, and I often received comments from co-workers while I was a Park Ranger that I was really cut out for the job. (Interacting with visitors, mind you – - – I was definitely not able to make the grade physically in one park where I worked, but parks like that are pretty uncommon.) But when you are capable of “more” then you want to do “more”, if for no other reason than that it pays better. Now I am in Germany, and high customer contact positions are no longer an option because my German won’t ever be at the necessary level. I have the good fortune to have had a technical education so that some doors are open for me, but one still wonders at night. (Comfortingly, my husband has similar thoughts, so I know I am not alone.)
Over the past few days I have been drafting emails to former professors, in the hope that they might pass on to me any job-related fliers that might pass through their hands. There are many positions that get “advertised” privately in Germany, which isn’t all the different than in the States I suppose. D. has received emails at work from project collaborators looking for employees. Unfortunately, neither of the two positions were closely enough related to my field for me to apply. I am no longer living in the city where I studied and am working to reestablish some kind of network. (D. is strangely the only German I know that isn’t a Vereinsmitglied of any shape or form.)
Back to the email – One of the emails won’t be a problem because the addressee was at my wedding, and hopefully hasn’t forgotten me in the past few weeks, but for the others striking a balance between reminding someone of who you are and German directness is hard to do, and every corrected email I get back from D. strikes me as too brusque, so it’s back to the drawing board.
In the silver lining department -
I sent off an email to someone in the hopes of setting up a German/English tandem.
And here are some pictures of the flowers at my wedding. We left so much up to the florist – and there were aspects of her execution where it was obvious she had really listened to me when we met to discuss the flowers. (I love wildflowers, but I wanted the flowers for the Church to be more formal – she pulled it together so well.) Not everything went as well – see the very obvious hairclips – but I was thrilled with the flowers.
The bouquet below was our jumping-off point and we wanted to go more “autumn”.
Thank you for the encouragement to see that there is an opportunity to be taken advantage of for us this Christmas. I have been trying to think through what I have liked and not liked in Christmases past.
I do not want to end up in front of the TV or at the movies because I have the sense that there is nothing else to do.
I want to go to church where it isn’t lame. Midnight Mass at 9:45 isn’t Midnight Mass. I want an orchestra and darkness and candles and a sense of mystery. I would like it to be packed and I want to have to get there early to get a seat.
If you ever have the chance to spend Christmas in Denver, there is only one place to go.
But with Denver so far away, we might be headed to Strasbourg for Christmas – groovy Midnight Mass and Christmas markets before and after. I would miss out on my BBC Christmas Music though and I couldn’t call home. A lot to think about.
Our colleagues in the office put this present together for our wedding. Note the shirts, seat cushions, and curtains created from money, the tiny hangers. That throw rug, in front of the bed, was hand woven.
My mother-in-law wants to keep if for her grandchildren to play with. As long as she is willing to store it, I have no problems with that, but I cannot wrap my mind around the work that went into this. They hung our picture!! on the wall. I find it almost unsettling.
Chalk this up to “higher highs and lower lows”
My husband, who headed off to work with the digital camera, so I can’t post photos of our adventures into southern Hessen yesterday, is one of the few people in my life with whom I can switch languages. There are times when I need to express an idea I can’t translate, and he’s now to the point where he can deal with it without missing a beat. (Borat flashback – It’s niiiiiice.)
There are so many things that can make intercultural marriage difficult, so many things you take for granted that bite you in the butt, but it occured to me the other night that D. speaks such wonderful German. (I am in no position to know that he does. It’s adequate, but he’s no Goethe-thank God.) He has definitely complemented me on my English, which is in a sorry state at the moment.
Which has lead me to conclude that -
It’s lovely that difficult things come with hidden bonuses, and that there can be someone who sees extraordinary talents in skills that are simply natural for you.
A sweet reminder of some of the more lovely things about home, if home happens to be Canada or the U.S., from the clever folks at The Typing Chimps
And my best wishes to all headed home (or to spend time with family) for the Holidays (i.e. Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa). Enjoy it!
Anybody have ideas for how to spend Christmas pretty much alone as a couple? (keep it clean!) Christmas has always been an extended-family holiday and I don’t have too many ideas, and we don’t have a fireplace.
NPR carries A Festival of 9 Lessons and Carols, and for the first time in many years I will be somewhere with a decent internet connection, so we can listen.
or another thing that gets me through the week.
I discovered this Fall that a number of US universities have lectures available as podcasts or streaming files. I can’t tell you how many days this has helped me pass at home. It’s worlds away from Arbeitslosenfernsehen. There aren’t nearly enough for the non-computer gal, but let me at least point out the one’s I’ve been listening to.
ANTH379 (Indians of North America)
This lecture gets off to an extremely slow start. Lots of talk of diet, etc. and I think Dr. Watson is a lecturer whose style you either love or hate. He strikes me as quite avuncular, and I find the subject material interesting.
Somewhere online there is a list that has all the Purdue Boilercast course numbers translated into real-people-speak, but I have lost the link to the page and have not been able to find it again. I’d be grateful to have it if anyone else stumbles onto it. Otherwise, one must listen to the first few minutes of the first lecture of each class or hunt for the university catalog online. Of course, the department name should be more or less clear from the course name.
There are also quit a few polysci letctures and sociology – I just never got that far. Maybe next semester.
And leading me to wish that I had wanted to go to college in CA like most of the other people in my class are the Berkeley course offerings.
I am a particular fan of European History from the Rennaissance to the Present. There’s a video feed for this course, too. The professor uhh’s way to much, but if you can get past that, the course is entertaining and I love his references to period art and music to illustrate his theses about historical trends. One gets the feeling that the lecturer has a profound sympathy with the people about whose times he is speaking – quite bluntly, he doesn’t speak condescendingly about them, he seeks to explain their world view to the extent that you or I could set ourselves in their places rather than pitying them in their ignorance. And he speaks very knowlegably about Catholicism. There are a couple of points where I would have worded something differently, but generally he is really good. He’s plenty critical of the Church in later lectures, but that is his “gutes Recht”, and it definitely comes through that he has had more than a little bit of German. If I had moose hooves to award, this lecture gets all 4.
Also worth a listen, although I don’t think I progressed much beyond the first few lectures was Geo 10 World Regions, Peoples, and States Even if you don’t want to listen to the whole series, the second lecture in which he discusses an in class assignment in which students were to devise a plan for regionalizing the US for representation on a map was pretty amusing.
We’ve also been listening to Earthquakes in Your Backyard. I liked the Hurricane Katrina wrap up, although I thought it wasn’t nearly detailed enough. Physics for future presidents also had a nice 9/11 recap lecture. The lecturer is a bit too self-congratulatory, but a lot of folks do that when retelling historic events. His retelling brought me crashing back to 9/11 because I spent the day with my ex-boyfriend who was visiting from Europe. He is an academic in the materials science field, so there was someone to fill in the missing pieces for me (temperatures at which steel begins to deform) very early on. We’ll save all that for 9/11 next year and hope that by then, I won’t have half so much time to blog!
I am something of a news junkie so I jumped when I read this German report.
Doctor Ordered to Pay for Unwanted Baby
Unwanted enough for this hideous lawsuit, but somehow this apparently healthy child was never put up for adoption. Hope he or she at least gets an Ipod out of the deal.
Ok, I am procrastinating. Checked out the “Fachmesse” yesterday and to my horror discovered that there were no lay people there checking anything out. I wonder if there was anyone there who wasn’t a rep at another one of the booths. This is going to make it extremely difficult for me to go make chit chat with the reps of the two companies about which I would like learn more.
I also have to get all dolled up because I would otherwise be the only one there not in a suit.
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