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| Going to school |
To paint a picture of the environment we are living in I’ll start this post off with the comment Maciek made when he returned from a ride on his new mountain bike. “That was awesome, I could’ve slapped a cow on the arse!”
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| Yodel Man |
I took the kids for a walk yesterday afternoon to the village and back. There are lovely streams running through it, and a river, all crystal clear. So many walking trails, mountains of cows (pardon the pun!). Acres of fields. Nobody has a fence around their house, and if they do it’s just a little picket one because it looks pretty! It’s weird wandering around a ‘suburb’ where all the houses are open, you could just wander through someone’s back yard. It’s hard to tell which land is private and which bit you can run around on! We’re less than a 5 minute drive from the school which is in town. No traffic lights, no traffic jams. September has been a beautiful month weather wise, pretty cold in the morning, mostly foggy or misty, but by lunch time we’re in shorts and t-shirts as it’s close to 30 degrees. Except for the day it snowed! Hard to know what to dress the kids in for school, as they often go out for walks (no parental permission required?!) (I refer back to the “Health and Safety: Was ist Das?” post!) Too bad if there’s an emergency and I need to collect them from school unexpectedly only to find them not there, but up the mountain with the class learning about which mushrooms are delicious and which ones are deadly!
Maciek has been working now for a week and a half. His boss speaks good English, and they guy he was working with for the first few days has a brother living in Oz and has travelled around it himself for 6 months, his English is good and he even knows some Aussie slang! They do things quite differently though, and use different tools. He leaves the house at 6.45am and doesn’t get home until 5pm, so it’s a long day after not working for over 3 months, so needless to say he’s pretty knackered! And we miss him every afternoon, especially me, I count down the hours!
The Austrians speak with a dialect very different to high German. And every town has a different one. Someone told us that their son can’t understand the kids from a village 15 minutes drive away when they meet for sports games. I am only starting to be able to hear the difference, slightly. Two weeks ago I went to a parents evening at the school, thankfully the office manager sat next to me to translate. The teacher taking the meeting began speaking, and then asked if I understood any German at all. I said I could understand only bits and pieces, so then she asked me if I minded if she spoke in dialect rather than German. I said, “Go ahead, it makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever!” But most people speak at least a little English, and all learn high German in school, so we can fumble through. |
| Sneaky Poppy Moss |
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| The longest table |
It was the annual Knodelfest on the weekend where everyone dresses in traditional Austrian dress and Lederhosen, drinks loads of beer and eat all sorts of sweet and savoury dumplings. There are live bands playing traditional yodelly type music and the longest table you’ve ever seen set up through the town. All the shops are still open, not really sure why as I can’t see how anyone would be interested in shopping with all that knee slapping going on, and it looked impossible to even get into the shops anyway, with the crowds blocking the entrances. For an entrance fee of E3.00 you get a Knodelfest Badge, which I thought was quite a nice souvineer until I noticed it was from 2008! Much like a mini Oktoberfest, fun to look at and take photos of funny old men (see pic), but not really something we could experience properly with the little ones. We did spot a pic of Poppy Moss in the local paper the next day though, and he told us he wasn’t interested in coming to Europe! Fibber! Love the hat Albe!
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