We have a flat

We decide to take over our friend's flat. He is getting married and moving. It has 5 rooms - one is a "cabinet" which is a room the size of a cabinet, 1 is a storage room but we think we'll change it back to a cabinet, and 2 large rooms and one living room. It is 95 - 100 square meters.

Here if the description doesn't say kitchen or toilet, it doesn't have one. Just a room with the fittings for one. Also bond here is from 3-6months rent...ouch! and most places also have added to that the rental agents fee....also 3-6months rent. double ouch. But it gets better, if the last person spent money renovating the place, he will expect you to reimburse him and others will expect you to buy their furniture off them as part of the rental agreement. But there's more.

As part of the rental agreement, other places expect you to not only paint the place but put in new floors and have them lacquered. Tres Bizarre.

Ice Age 2

It's still funny! We loved it.

I give it a 10 out of 10.
Jordy's is an 8 and a half.
Greg's rating, a good 9.

So hows it going?

So far so good. We haven,t found a flat yet but we are looking. We have been all over the place.

Yesterday we viewed 6 places. we didn't get any replies for a while and then all of a sudden everyone was ringing us. Grge has discovered the secret which was that as soon as he started writing Dr Greg as a contact people all of sudden wanted to know us. Perhaps his original title Mr Cow may not have been as appealing.

Everyone keeps asking what district do you want to live in and cant quite understand that we don#t care because eveywhere is close here. They just about fall over when we tell them in NZ we only have to pay 3 weeks rent as bond. Here it is 3 - 6 months bond. OUCH! then 3-6months agent fee. Apart from that, rent is very reasonable.

News flash! Our teenager has already decided she loves it here but she loves NZ more, aa...and she is even considering going to Uni here.

Everyone here is very friendly and tolerant of our non german speaking status.

Gregs workplace is also very friendly and works very similarly to any Uni.

tourist traps

So far we have found 2 tourist traps. The first is the well known Fiakers otherwise known as horse and carts, $80 for 20mins or $120 for 40 mins. And Greg wants me to let you all be warned about the smell. They may look beautiful but they stink. They have poo pouches attached to catch the poos as they fall. So you can imagine. Times that by 30 or more in the same vicinity.... ooh smells baaad.

tourist trap number 2, we went to dinner last night and they out bread on the tables. we thought that someone had ordered it but no. The idea is that you unwittingly eat it and then they charge you for it.

The Ewings have arrived inAustria.

Wir sind hier und wir sind sehr froh. In other words we are here and we are very happy.

We landed on Sunday and Greg was bound and determined that we not be soft and collapse into our beds. So we had about 1-2 hours of lounging and then we went out to discover Vienna.

The transport system here totally rocks. We bought a weekly pass for $25 and it covers all modes of transport. Jordy pays nothing public holidays and weekends. Vienna is quite small so we can get from end to end in an hour or less depending on if you know what you are doing which we didn#t really.

So we picked a place to aim for. And we were off. It only took us about 6 hours to get the the Augarten(our goal) but that is only natural because we would catch sight of something and want to go and ooh and ahh over it. Alsö if we got the wrong train we would go exploring.

Jordy and I were a bit comatose but we werent allowed to sleep until 7pm so we wouldn't get jetlag.

So our first day we saw the Votivkirche, we went to the end of the U1 (U stands for the underground rail different to trains), we went around a lot of the innerestadt... around and around and around because when the S-bahns(S is for street so the same as trams) get to the end of their route they do a loop and then we'd end up back where we started. haha.