Winter Times

Though Vienna is still lacking in snow, it has finally turned cold, making it feel like it's actually winter. In the spirit of this bone chilling cold, I will now treat you to a myriad of photos detailing the lovely winter adventures I have been embarking upon.
Once a week, all the Boku exchange students gather at a local pub to have fun times and catch up after half a week of hectic schooling (I have no idea what's going on with this underline, I can't stop it!!!). The past week, we decided to skip out on the warmth provided by Tunnel (the pub) to venture to a skating rink, where the majority of us could fall on our asses. Surprisingly, it was pretty cheap, unlike everything else in Vienna, and we spent about 3 hours there. I do feel as though I shamed my heritage because honestly, I suck at skating and by the end of the evening my ankles were killing me. Still, I did have the advantage over the Spaniards, but, oddly enough, one of the Australians was freaking amazing! Apparently she plays tons of street hockey so was a wiz on wheels.

The penguins were to help beginning skaters

Or, you know, battle

Next up, CHRISTMAS MARKETS!!!!
Unless the name didn't give it away, the main things sold during these markets are Christmas-y things, such as ornaments, candles, and toys. There's also nifty glass work or winter apparel (like mittens and hats). Really the contents of the stands can be pretty random, depending on which Christmas market one goes to. However, there is one thing in common. All the markets have at least one stand where punch or, the more popular, gluhwein (mulled wine) is sold. And of course, there's also food, which is also quite varied. But I think my personal favorite is this wondrous creation. What we have here, is a waffle with chocolate, nuts, and powdered sugar. Austrians are kind of against plastic utensils, so I didn't get a fork, which resulted in me getting chocolate all over my hands, a fate that I was quite resigned to.

Christmas market in Schönbrunn (the old palace)

These things start around the middle of November and are friggin' everywhere, especially in the 1st district. There's even a small one in the park near my university which has a stand where the guy does his glassblowing work where it can be viewed by all. Super awesome.

Today, Rebecca and I went to check out the market at Schönbrunn, mostly because I wanted to pick up a gift for my host family since they're letting me crash with them when I come visit. Like I said, the stands can vary as to what they contain, but there were a few selling candles so I bought a beeswax candle (Austrians love their beeswax :-P) and a nice picture frame.

I didn't buy anything from here, but the figurines looked neat.

Wandering through the market with Rebecca (she's the one with the black jacket)

What also exists during the wintertime are maroni stands, which serve chestnuts (maroni), kartofelpuffers (like hash browns), slices of potatoes, and langos. I had no idea what a langos was since there's no real translation into English, but I was wandering about the city and decided to grab one since I hungered like no other. To begin with, a langos is a huuuuge piece of fried bread with one glorious addition. As I was ordering the woman asked me something but I didn't quite grab the meaning so I just nodded and smiled (my go to move when I don't understand what the person is saying). Turns out she was asking if I wanted garlic butter, which increased the deliciousness of this food tenfold.

Behold! I wasn't able to resist a nibble before I too the pic.

And to everyone who celebrates, Happy Hanukkah!!! So far I've made latkes twice, but the first time I didn't use enough oil so they didn't cook all the way. The second time was much better though, and I also bought falafals and fried them in oil as anything fried in oil is the true Hanukkah fashion.

Failure, delicious failure

And in the spirit of Hanukkah, I went on a journey the past week to an area that's supposed to have a few Jewish stores. The object of my hunt was matzo meal but.....I may have bought...more things. The first store I went to, had matzo meal so I just bought it and got out but, there was another store, a store of magic and happiness known as Kosherland!! Here I discovered kishke mix, gelt (chocolate for Hanukkah), a dreidle, and.....dill pickles!!! For those who haven't heard me complain, proper pickles are a rare commodity in Europe and every time I would try one would be a sweet sweet lie. The jar is currently sitting on my shelf and I plan to open it upon my return to Vienna. However, this may lead to a sodium overdose but even if that happens, I go out happy. :-DOnce I have more free time, the hunt for a Jewish bakery will commence and I will feast upon tasty challah.

Cabin

Upon arriving in Austria I realized that a) lacking a host family and b) taking classes in English meant that if I wanted to get better at German I would need to actually take the initiative and work on it outside of school. Luckily, the universities in Vienna have a tandem learning buddy system, where you get a list of people and what languages they offer/want to learn. Then you just e-mail them and work out when to meet and what to learn. I signed up for this before realizing that actual schoolwork would be occupying most of my time, but regardless, it allowed me to meet Gernot, an Austrian. We only met a few times and both those times I helped him with his English since he had to take a huge insane English test to go on exchange to Australia.
Anyways, since Gernot is a native he suggested going to a cabin sometime and we finally worked out the details so on December 5th a group of about 10 of us piled into three cars and drove for a few hours to St. Anna's. Before getting there though, we stopped off at Gernot's place and met his dad. Although I've only really met two Austrians on their home turf (i.e Gernot's parents) I have determined this. If you're hungry or thirsty, you will be given food and drink. If you're not hungry or thirsty, you will be given food and drink. I was almost stifling my laughter as we all sat down and Gernot's dad put out some apple juice and water, despite us all saying we weren't thirsty. Oh well, it was delicious and natural and tasted a bit like cider.
Once we got to the cabin area we first went into this kind of house/restaurant (I think it's called a Gasthaus) where hikers/skiers will stop by after conquering the mountain.

Inside the Haus
It was very....rusticAnd they had a mop with legs, I mean a dog!!!

I suppose I should have mentioned before that this post is yet again going to be super photo heavy, but that's the price to be paid when I go to places that have views like this.And there was snow, glorious, glorious snow.

We stayed in the building on the left.
Now, before the next pictures, allow me to spin you a tale. In Austria there is this tradition that on the 5th of December a curious pair of figures goes house to house to scare/reward the children residing there. The first "person" that comes is the Krampus, which looks like a sort of furry human with horns and pointed teeth, the Austrian version of a devil. The Krampus asks what the children did that were naughty and threaten to beat them with bunches of twigs but normally the parents intervene by offering the Krampus something to eat or drink. At the end of it the child promises to be good and then the second person arrives, or he arrives earlier to chase off the Krampus (I didn't really get a full understanding of what goes down). This second person is St. Nickolas, not to be confused with Kris Kringle, the gent that brings gifts on Christmas Day. St. Nick brings small gifts like chocolates or bags of peanuts. This normally happens in smaller cities but in the bigger cities it's apparently possible to rent a Krampus and St. Nick to come terrify your child. So, in the family that lived in the gasthaus has a young daughter (maybe more children, she's the only one I saw) so when the Krampus and St. Nick went there, the owner told them that there were some people occupying the cabin that had probably been very bad. :-P

The two Krampuses de-masked (sorry for the bad quality, didn't use flash)

Ana decides to Krampus it up a bitSt. Nick to save the day!!

After St. Nick and one of the Krampuses departed (the other one stayed with us for the rest of the weekend, strange, but fun) it was decided that the time for consuming food should commence. So we banished a few people to the kitchen to make dinner.

Sam chopping up the onions for pastaThe rest of the evening consisted of: Puzzle timeMidnight romps in the snowRocking mandolin and guitar duosFine ArtInjuries (Rose lost her balance and grabbed the stove)Onion juggling (this was actually the next morning)

The next morning, I surprised myself and I think the world in general by being the first one up, at 11:00. Sitting in the main room just drinking some tea and looking out the window was one of the nicest things I've done here. All the snow just looked right and the mountains were amazing. In case I haven't mentioned yet, there is no snow in Vienna (it rained today) and rumor has it that snow in the city proper is a rare thing, so I took the opportunity to get in all my snow cravings. Once everyone else woke up and had coffee at the gasthaus a few of us decided to hike up the mountain. Unfortunately the rest of the people woke up too late so we couldn't make it to the top before it got dark. We did get above the timberline though, and between the really steep slope, high altitude, and a bit of a cough, I was kinda glad that we ended when we did.
By the time we all re-assembled back at the cabin quite a few people were really regretting leaving so, they didn't. And by a few people I mean everyone but Gernot and I (he had to work and I had a class I couldn't miss). But, Gernot wasn't going back to Vienna so I had to take the train, which I feel would have been nicer if I could have seen the scenery, but it all worked out ok.
Despite having tons more pictures I'm not gonna post them here because it's kind of an annoying process. I might be doing something wrong, but when I add a picture it shows up at the top of the post so I have to draaaaaaag it all the way to the bottom, meh. But I will be putting up all the rest of the mountain majesty on my photobucket account. Here's one picture to whet your appetite for the rest of the awesome awesome scenery.

Pseudo-Thanksgiving

I return from being sick/having to study, so lo, there will be a post! Also, something has actually happened which merits a post as life of yet has been rather routine. Go to school, go home, go to friend's place for coffee, make some damn tasty food (ATTENTION FUTURE ROOMIE(S)!! I have discovered I like to cook to be prepared for eating delicious concoctions and other such things).
Anywho,
Since it is genetically impossible to spend a year without ingesting pie in a way that is associated with Thanksgiving, me and a few other people hatched a plan to have a Thanksgiving dinner. However, due to late classes and other factors, it couldn't actually be on Thanksgiving, which works for me because then I could chat with my family in all their house-filling-ruckus-causing-iron dragon-playing entirety.
So on Friday, after swinging by the store for some last minute ingredients, I journeyed over to Rebecca's apartment to begin the cooking. Now, the thing about Austrian housing (at at least what I've decided based on my kitchen and Rebeccas's) is that a normal oven is very rare. Instead, there are tiny convection ovens, which are ok for some things, but annoying when it comes to baking anything large (so a turkey was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out). But, there was still pie, though we had to cook them one at a time. Rebecca decided to make pumpkin pie while I opted for chocolate. Since the pumpkin was still defrosting the preparation for chocolate tastiness began and it all went quite smoothly. One minor problem was that corn syrup (a needed ingredient) doesn't exist in any store that I explored so instead I made just a simple sugar syrup which worked wonderfully. The problem came when I was testing to see if the sugar had dissolved in the water or not. Let it be known, eating hot sugar syrup is extremely painful as it sticks to the roof of the mouth like an octopus of fire (not that it has 8 legs, just that it clings). About half of the roof of my mouth was all smooth and tender after that. Also, if anyone is concerned, if making a pie crust is an impossibility, just use dough for sugar cookies, it works really well.
As the chocolate pie was baking and potatoes were boiling I began work on the gravy, mushroom gravy to be precise. I was sooooooooooooooooooo happy that it worked and I felt ultra fancy because I even added some wine.
Once the pie was out of the oven we took a quick side trip to a store and picked up some sweet potatoes and cranberry jelly (since it was the only thing we could find). And then returned to the apartment where Rebecca continued to diligently peel potatoes.
The pumpkin pie turned out equally good, although the filling was a bit, spongy I guess, because we added too much flour. But I'd say since we used actual pumpkin (not from a can) we are afforded our screw-ups.
More cooking went down, looking up recipes, listening to music and a whoooole lot of kitchen tool improvisation before we were finally ready at around 6:30. Now, granted we went to the store, and we only had one tiny oven and two stove tops to cook with, but still, we started cooking at like 12:00. I had NO IDEA it takes so long, and this is after spending my whole life watching other people spend all day cooking for Thanksgiving. Mom, Dad, Aaron, I now appreciate your efforts. Although, despite having spent our whole day cooking, Rebecca and I both agreed that it was worth skipping class for. :-P
One other small cooking snafu arose when it was time for the stuffing to go into the oven. The instructions called for tin foil, but there was none to be found so Yuri (from Russia) suggested using waxed paper that had been buttered (with the butter side down). This was working pretty well, until I lifted up the paper a bit to check on the stuffing and.....WOOOOSHHH!!!!! The paper caught on fire (yeah, the oven is THAT small). I stared at the fire and did a little panicky dance and Rebecca merely glanced over and said "make sure it doesn't burn the carpet," leaving fire putting out duties to Yuri, who took them like a champ. The stuffing even survived with only a light singeing of the top most layer.
The actual dinner itself was fantastic. It was a potluck so not only was there Thanksgiving food, but Spanish Omelet, fruit salad, some kind of spicy pasta salad, twice-baked potatoes, pita and hummus, and some chocolates (homemade by Jess, awesome I know). I can proudly say that all the non-Thanksgiving-celebrating people (i.e not America or Canadian) left the apartment with a solid urge to simply nap and not eat for a day or so, and really, isn't that what Thanksgiving is all about?
Oh, and mashed potatoes without butter and mixed with one of those electric slicer things? Yeah, that turns into potato glue.
Pictures will be up eventually, I gotta steal them from some one's camera.
P.S Sarah I'll send you a postcard if you send me your address!