"The Stupid Family Roam"

So we did our usual roam which sounded like this-
"this one's too expensive",
"ugh not Italian!I'm sick of Italian"
"What about that one?....Aww what? It's Italian?!"
"I didn't come half way round the world just to eat Chinese, American etc..."
"Hey this one looks alright....of course it is;It's closed"
Which brought our walk back to Farmers Restaurant which seemed to be about as american as they come. In the end we thought what the hell. It's not like we have any plans to travel to America, and we will be eating something we can't eat in Vienna.

JOrdy and I decided to get one of those meals for two people;more like a meal for the whole family. Goodness-2 spareribs, 6 chicken wings, 4 chicken tenders, 2 chicken filets, 2 corn on the cobs, potato wedges, 2 halves of garlic bread, onion rings and a huge baked potato. I didn't want to waste our money or the food so I even had a go at eating a whole sparerib! Greg was impressed. I even impressed myself. What I didn't tell Greg was that I was fighting the whole time not to run to the toilet and "divest" myself of the sparerib. But I won.

Then it was straight home to bed. The 5 o'clock start was really starting to catch up with us. Especially Greg who had only had 2 hours sleep. He was so funny. He lay down for a moment and that was it till 8am the next morning. Oh well. At least he was already dressed and ready to go.

The Dom

Considering how many cathedrals we have already seen, to still be quite impressed by this one is saying something. Greg is always struck by the fact that when these people planned building this thing, they had to have known that they wouldn't be alive to see it completed, but they went ahead and did it anyway. We can't even get our politicians to start anything major because they don't want to commit to anything that will take more than 3 years. Bah!

Anyway, Jordy and I were tickled to see a painting of St Gregorius on the ceiling of one tiny part of the cathedral;since that's who Greg is named after. Jordy says she wasn't tickled, but she certainly gave a good impression of it. Who cares. I was tickled enough for all three of us.

First day in Cologne

It took us a little time to get into town, check-in and have lunch. Especially after we had done the "The Stupid Family Roam" which usually begins with Jordy wants to eat somewhere, in this case KFC, which is then deemed as unacceptable for various reasons,(too expensive, try something/somewhere new, we can do that in NZ, don't want to),then we roam uptown and downtown for an average of half an hour, only to end up back where we started; By which time we are so fed up we decide to hang the expense and just eat here. You would think that after 6 years of this, we would know better.

To further add to our discontent, it was now too late to make visiting museums worthwhile. But it wasn't as bad as it sounded this time because during our roam we had managed to see a few of the tourist sights.-Heinzelmaennchenbrunnen
-Peek&Cloppenburg Weltstadthaus
-the Dropped Cone
-The Naked Guy(Not the real name, guess who it's modelled on?)



The "Dom" (cathedral) was open so we had a really good look through.(More later). So what's left to do once the museums etc.. are closed? Go to the pub of course. Very authentic german pub, with excellent waiters. Even I tried the local beer. The table we sat at was reserved for 7.30pm. Just enough time to have 4 beers(@1.35 Euros/200mls) and a coke(2euros).cheap.

Next on the agenda......the "stupid family Roam" sigh.

Travelling to Cologne

We managed to get a super cheap flight to Cologne but we
had to get the plane from Bratislava. Which was okay by us, because to us, Bratislava is synonymous with "best chocolate shop" ever. I think Jordy would be content to go anywhere in the world so long as it was via "our" chocolate shop.
Whilst we were waiting for our flight, we decided to kick start the day with a bit of ice-cream. mmm-mmmmm.,

We had a nice little surprise when we went through check-in because we managed to get another stamp in our passports. Our excitement was such, that even the control officer was grinning at our foolishness.

Part of the reason our tickets were cheap is that food and drink were not included. This turned outto make the flight quite restful as you didn't have the attendants going up and down the aisle all the time getting in your way; they didn't get all grumpy and stressed about getting all this done before the end of the flight or by demanding passengers.

So we get to Cologne and end up being held up by our"super-efficient new fancy chip passports". Yeah right. However the passport control officer was very entertaining to watch as he struggled to count how many months we had already been in the E.U., and if we were legally allowed to be where we were, all without trying to let on to us what he was doing. We think he should have used his fingers to help him count faster.

So we just pulled out our Austrian residency cards and then he was all happy and waved us through. The only one who wasn't happy was Jordan because it meant we didn't get another stamp in our passports.

Language difficulties

Every nationality seems to have a little of the alphabet that the rest of the world struggles to be able to pronounce. For us English speakers, we struggle mightily to be able t0o even hear the difference between a "u", and a "u with an umlaut";let alone pronounce it.

The Germans seem to struggle with the 'v' sound which is odd because they have this sound in their alphabet. Although in German their letter "v" has an "ef" sound. So it's not unusual for us to hear, willage, instead of village etc...

Well, you can imagine Jordan's amusement when we were on board our "Sky Europe" flight, to see on the back of every seat in the plane a sticker with the words, "Life west under seat". I think that entertained her for half the flight.

It's so warm here.

It's true. Around 15 degrees seems to be pretty much the average. Greg is of the opinion that the whole snow and freezing cold thing is all completely made made up. Proof of how warm it is, is that when we were in Cologne, one of the outdoor skating rinks had just been dismantled. Not cold enough to keep it frozen.

If I'd thought about it I would have taken a photo but I didn't think about it until our 3rd day there and all the ice had already melted.

The ultimate proof of how warm it is, is that I wore a skirt today.

Crazy Crazy

Overall we have found the Viennese to be very lawabiding. The usual answer to, "what's the fine for this," Is "I don't know. And I don't want to find out. " So it was rather odd to hear that so many people were preparing to "batten down the Hatches" so to speak, for New year's Eve. Apparently, people are just crazy at this time of the year.

Of course we just thought, yeah right. I'm sure they couldn't even come close to giving the English, Aussies or even the Kiwis a run for their money when it comes to being drunk or disorderly, or drunk and disorderly. What we hadn't factored into the equation was fireworks. They still sell rockets here. And because there are rules and laws for everything we thought for sure, the same would hold true for fireworks. Apparently not.

Vienna is all apartment blocks. We never for one minute thought people would let off fireworks amongst all this. But they did. And there were fireworks going off left right and centre. Poor Jordy even had an incident where some stupid lout threw a few double happys under her seat. Greg made sure that that young fellow understand just how unimpressed he was with this kind of behaviour. Some things can be very clearly understood whatever language you speak. Go Greg.

We did get to have a great view of the fireworks from the top of the University Chemistry building thanks to a good friend from church. It didn't take long before you couldn't see very far in front of you do to all the smoke from the fireworks. We stayed for half and hour and there was no sign of the fireworks slowing down.

The cool thing was though that extra U-bahn and Strassenbahns were run from midnight until about 6 am, for New years. U-bahns came every 15 mins. So getting home wasn't a problem except for worrying about the crazies with rockets. So next year we will be joining the other sensible people and staying home.

Christmas Eve

We were kindly invited to a friend's place for dinner. And I was pleased that we were also going to fondue for dinner. Our friend who invited us, Tanja, is vegetarian so we had to bring our own meat. Unfortunately for Greg since I was almost vegetarian myself before he married me, I have little knowlege of what meat is good to buy or even how to cook it. The best I normally can do is mince which I have found is like a "magic" food because it's very hard to wreck it. So Greg always has to make do with chicken/turkey which is very cheap here.

Apparently fondue is the thing to do at this time. I went to the library to try and get a fondue cookbook but I was too slow. Every single fondue cookbook was out. I had also tried to buy a fondue at the local equivalent of a Salvation Army. It had been there since we arrived so I was no hurry to get it. Obviously no one else wanted it. Wrong!

Anyway, Greg was rather apprehensive about being surrounded by vegetables, (insert scary threatening music here or feel free to make your own ghostly oooh -wooh sounds), but he ate some and he even enjoyed them Aaa-and he had seconds and thirds and fourths. (Insert THUD as jaws hit the ground).