My host mom’s family is from Austria, mainly, and
Christmas is the time when that whole side gets together – plus, there was a
major birthday for one aunt or another – so the week before Christmas we packed
up and headed for Austria. Well, indirectly. Oma took Daniel home first, and
Anna and I followed with Elsa the day after. We spent a day at Oma and Opa’s
house and then we headed for Austria.
Austria was great. I didn’t take as many pictures
as I normally would have while we were there, because it was a family gathering
and I didn’t want to intrude or anything. We spent most of our time with Anna’s
extended family – her mother has several sisters and a brother, and they each
have spouses and kids and most of the kids had spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends and/or
kids… And let me tell you this: Baptists have nothing on eating when going up against Austrians. Our first day,
we went to lunch at this little restaurant – a four-course meal that lasted
more than three hours. Then we all went back to one of the aunts’ house, and as
soon as we got there all the women headed to the kitchen and started bringing
out cakes and coffee… and as soon as that was gone, it was time for dinner! I
have literally never eaten so much in such a short period of time. It didn’t
help that I had a bit of altitude sickness, though, and wasn’t feeling very
well.
The kids and Oma and Opa stayed with Anna
grandparents – Oma’s parents – in their house, but there wasn’t enough room for
everyone, so Anna and I slept at a little boarding-house-style lodging area. It
mainly services Catholic pilgrims coming through on a pilgrimage to one of the
churches in the region, and instead of just a room with a couple of beds, we
basically had a little apartment: a kitchenette, bathroom, bedroom, and a fold-away
bed for me.
The second day, it had snowed overnight, so Anna,
Oma, and Anna’s brother Patrick took me up the mountain to a ski slope. We
didn’t ski – there actually wasn’t enough snow for it, just enough for the kids
to break out the sleds – but I got to eat Alpine snow. :D Also, I can now say
that I was injured on an Austrian Alpine ski slope, because when we were
walking back down I stepped onto a patch of snow that was concealing a deep
hole. The hill swallowed my entire leg up to the hip and I punched the snow/ice
hard enough that the next day, not only did I have a twisted muscle in my leg
and a wrenched neck from falling, but my knuckles were bloody and bruised like
I’d punched someone in the teeth. :D
I have to admit – I’m a bit proud of that.
On the way back down the mountain, we stopped at
this tiny old schoolhouse – I think it was where Oma went to school as a girl.
It’s pretty far away from the rest of the village, and when I asked why, she
explained that this was the farmers’ school. It was fairly centrally situated
for the various farms in the region. Apparently, about eleven kids made up a
full class. When we got back in the car, Oma
joked that finally there had been
a real teacher at the school – Patrick teaches at a high-school in Vienna.
I enjoyed this part of the trip – though it was
somewhat stressful, being the one random outsider in a big family gathering.
Everyone was really nice, but I tended to just hang about in corners and play
with the kids so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Partly because I was shy,
and partly for the purely practical reason that Austrian-German and
German-German are not quite the same
language. It was hard sometimes, even when people spoke slowly, to understand
what they meant because their accent is different, and the vocabulary often
included words I’d never learned – or words that I had learned different words for. Imagine someone who’d just started
learning English in Canada or England trying to communicate with someone from
the back-country of Mississippi. :D But they liked my cookies and I came away
with a few new recipes to try, so all’s well that ends well.
Next, I was off to Vienna!
~Mags
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