Getting here was half the fun!--Woche 1

We said goodbye to our friends and we were off to the airport.  It took a 15 passenger van to get us and our luggage to the airport.  With car seats included we counted 25 bags.  The car rental people called for the sky cap train to pick us up, but it never arrived.  We loaded it all up on to 3 luggage racks and off we went.  We made it to the terminal to check in.  As it turned out, they didn't have us in business class for the first leg of our trip (there weren't enough seats left in business class for all of us when the tickets were purchased.)  We didn't mind, except that we no longer had the baggage allowance.  So we had to pay for all of our 10 checked bags, $50.00/bag.  They also did not have us with seats together.  All 5 of us were spread out through the entire airplane.  No one had seats even in the same row.  The kids did surprizingly well with this and took their seats calmly.  When we got to Deagan, he decided that he didn't want his seat because he was sitting next to someone he didn't recognize.  That gentleman was nice enough to let Dan have his seat, so Deagan and Dan got to sit next to each other.  Oh, and Danyon got to sit on my lap.

The next flight we made sure that we were able to sit by each other.  We were in the front row.  That flight was very nice.  Holding Danyon put a little damper on the business class service, as he wanted to play with the headphones, table cloth, utensils, dishes, drinks, etc., but after dinner, he was fine.  The kids didn't eat much of their meals, except Dane, (it started cheese and bread, followed by a salad that didn't have RANCH dressing on it, and then steak with roasted eggplant and tomatoes.  Dessert was a chocolate torte.  Yum!)  It was all very good, just no kids meal options.  We were all able to get a few hours of sleep before breakfast.  Deagan loved playing the games on his personal T.V.  After breakfast, we were landing!

We arrived at the airport and headed for baggage.  We came to an escalator.  The kids wanted to go up it, so Dan took them up while I took the elevator with Danyon in his stroller.  The doors of the elevator opened, I got out and was already lost.  I went through a few empty hallways, following signs to exit.  I came to an emergency exit and figured I must be in the wrong spot.  I turned around and a police officer called me over to her booth.  I went over and she asked where I was going.  I told her I wanted to get to outside to Vienna.  She said I needed to go through her gate and all she needed was my passport.  I told her that I didn't have my passport on me.  It was with Dan and the kids on the escalator.  She told me to call him and tell him to bring my passport to me.  I told her that I didn't have a phone that would work in Vienna.  She wasn't impressed and told me that it was not possible for me to go through.  I thought I was going to spend my first night in Vienna in jail.  She said she would call her colleage though.  I was standing there sweating bullets.  Just as she was on her phone, another airport employee came through the gate and had Danyon's and my passports with him.  The lady stamped our passports, and the man brought us to where Dan and the kids were waiting on the other side of customs.  We had only been in the country for 2 minutes before we were in trouble!  Never in a million years would I have guessed that by going on an elevator you change your customs line completely.  After that, we ALL took the elevator together navigating all our luggage.  We finally arrived to the waiting area and found the driver who was helping us with all our bags.  He looked at all our bags and about fell over.  He took most of them in his car and waited for us to get our rental car and made sure we could fit the rest of the bags.  Then, we were off to our new home!

We got to our new place (about 30 minutes from the airport) and we were still 2 hours early for our walk through with the landlady.  Luckily though, there were workers who were there and the front gate to the driveway was open.  We emptied all our bags in the covered area (as it was raining) and I sat with the bags while Dan and the kids went grocery shopping.  About an hour later, I was all but frozen and was tired of getting dirty looks by the workers who kept whispering something to each other about all those bags of mine, Dan pulled up and so did the landlady.  She was early, wanting to get some things done before we arrived.  Ms. Demeter is a very nice lady who takes pride in her project.  She put a lot of extras in the house as she wanted to make sure it would be perfect for her children to live in one day.  She gave us a huge flower arrangement, a book on Beethoven (as we live next door to the Beethoven house), and an orange chocolate cake from the best Patiserie in town (it really was very good).  Dyllan said she loved the house as soon as she walked through the front door.  The walk through took a couple of hours as we learned how to run the gargage and other various items in the house.  The kids were literally bouncing off the walls as there was no furniture, no toys, and they had been sleep deprieved and a little anxious for awhile.  Going back to apartment living is harder once you have owned your own house.  I always feel like the kids are destroying everything and I try to be more careful with walls and everything going on.  I feel like I'm walking on egg shells all the time.  Before leaving home, I decided I wanted to paint the walls as everything here is white.  Now that I'm here, I don't feel like I can because it is not mine and I don't think that many people paint their apartments here.  All restaurants and buildings that we have been in have white walls. (Even in the furniture stores, the walls are white and they use color in the decorating, not the walls).

After the walk through, we decided to go shopping.  We knew that we needed some barstools for our kitchen and some other things.  We loaded the kids up and went to Electro Haas.  We were on a shopping spree.  We bought a washer (the biggest one we could afford--which is half the size of the one we had at home and the biggest they sell here without special ordering) and dryer, T.V., a mixer that had blender and food processor attachments, and DVD player.  It took only a little while to find someone who could speak English.  We spent a couple of hours wandering through the IKEA and came out with only a few things.  It was okay though because there wasn't much room in the car anyway--however, they were out of the barstools that we wanted, so we still didn't have anywhere to sit in the house.  We were exhausted and all the stores were closed by 6:00 Saturday night.  We came home and had frozen pizza with salami on it for dinner.

Sunday was a little more relaxed.  We slept in and started getting ready for church.  We got lost on the way there so we saw a little more of Vienna than we had planned.  We still made it to church in time for Sunday School and Sacrament meeting.  The kids got to meet their primary teachers and they thought it was going to be fun.  After church, we drove to the kids' school so they could see it.  It wasn't raining so we decided to go for a walk in our neighborhood.  We walked to the park that is just a block away.  There is a statue of Beethoven there.  There are also several really good portrait-taking places at this park.  I'm excited about that.  It will be a lot of fun to get the kids yearly pictures taken in various parts of the city!  Dan cooked a really nice dinner that we had to eat out the the 9x13 dish, taking turns eating off the serving spoon as we only had a couple.  We figured we would buy paper and plastic products until our things arrived, but have had trouble locating any paper products, except napkins.

Monday, Dan had an appointment at the bank downtown.  We decided to drive there (vs. public transit) as we wanted to head to the other IKEA to see if they had our barstools.  We took our GPS, but they must have changed the roads since he was programmed because he kept trying to tell us to drive on a road that we were not allowed on.  We drove around trying to get him to recalculate our route, but he kept trying to take us back the way we came.  We decided to park the car and walk from where we were.  We walked for several blocks through a really expensive part of the downtown (Versace, Cartier, etc.).  Dan got lost and we had to retrace our steps as we had already past the bank several blocks earlier.  Both Dane and I pointed out the bank, but Dan was on a mission--apparently to give us more exercise.  We finally made it back to the bank--20 minutes late.  People here are very considerate of the time and expect everyone to be punctual.  Wasn't a very good first impression, I don't think.  The guy did give the kids some key chains with a weird girl coin with stretchy legs.  These were a big hit as they were the first toys the kids had seen in weeks, so they said.  And, on the way back to the car, we stopped and got a few pastries from a shop for breakfast.  They were very tasty.  Then back to IKEA for 3 hours, yes, 3 hours.  The kids weren't very excited about this, but it is necessary to have something in the house.  We ended up buying 6 plates, cups, and silverware to use for the 6 weeks that we don't have our stuff.  Oh, and 6 barstools, too.  Then we stopped at a few more stores, loading up the car completely.  We had groceries, chairs, light fixtures, dishes, kitty litter, you name it, we had it.  By this time, the kids were complaining of all the items they had to hold on their laps, so we headed home.  We built a couple of chairs, ate dinner and then went to bed.

Tuesday the cats finally arrived in Vienna.  The appeared to be okay when they arrived.  They got out of their crates and started exploring.  We showed them the new litterbox and food and let them go free.  The kids had their assessments at school.  We drove up to the school.  The kids got to tour the school.  They even had a couple of 4th grade students who got to assist on the tour.  Every student, teacher, person, we met was very nice and the kids got to meet their teachers.  Deagan passed his assessments so he will be able to attend kindergarten here.  The others also did well on their assessments.  They are so excited to go to school.  They can hardly wait.  They are bored at home with nothing to do.  We do have T.V., but it is all in German except for a couple of news channels in English.  The kids did find SpongeBob, but his German voice is very different from his English one.  The tour of the school took most of the day.  They even gave us free lunch in the cafeteria.  The lunch is expensive, but it is good.  There were 5 dishes to choose from (meatballs, enchilada, vegetarian kabob, and tortelini)  They each had their own side dishes.  There was a small salad bar and all kinds of juices and milk to choose from.   After finishing there, we decided to go to a BIPA (a store that you find all over, as plentiful as Starbucks, that sells soap, shampoo, baby food)--but it still took us 45 minutes driving around to find one.  Dan parked the car and we shopped for about 20 minutes.  When we got back to the car, we had our first parking ticket.  Apparently, we didn't have a parking sticker for the district we were in and we were possibly in a handicapped zone.  This we learned from translating the words on the ticket in the online dictionary.  We feel stupid that we can't read signs and can't understand people in stores.  We almost missed out on an $85.00 rebate because we couldn't understand what the saleslady was trying to tell us.  The people are not rude (at least that we can understand), it's just that we can't speak or read the language very well yet, and not everyone speaks English.  They usually speak several languages though.  The kids that toured our kids around the school each spoke 3-5 languages.  That's pretty impressive since I only have one and am having trouble with a second.  We built some lockers that we got from IKEA and got to bed really late.  When we got to the bedroom, one of the cats left us a nice surprize on our air matress.  He was mad at us so he peed on the bed.  He got both blankets, the sheets, and one pillow.  Quite a mess.  It was already after midnight, we have no washing machine, and no extra blankets.  We threw the blankets and sheets into the tub, and scrubbed the air matress.  I put on an extra pair of socks, put my jacket over my feet, and Dan borrowed a blanket from Danyon.  It was a pretty miserable night.  I heard Dan mumbling that if that ever happens again, the cat will be burried in the back yard.

Wednesday the kids and I stayed home.  I tried to clean all the blankets with dishwashing soap.  I stomped around the tub for an hour.  I hung the blankets to dry and then the kids and I started building more things that we bought at IKEA.  We don't have closets here and have to build wardrobes and other things to put all our clothes in.  We don't feel like we're in that much of a hurry, though, because we're not sure when we'll get all our stuff.  The house echoes and when Danyon cries, it is VERY loud.  We need to get some carpets in to keep the noise down.  Even the kids running around the house is very loud.  By the end of Wednesday, I'm even more excited for the kids to go to school than they are.  That night, my cleaning attempt failed:  the blankets still smelled like cat pee and they weren't dry anyway.  We borrowed a second blanket from the kids, as they all have 2.

The first day of school was great!  The kids all love their teachers.  They made some friends and they had a good time.  I got the notes from the teachers that they need to make Valentines for their classmates.  It gives me an excuse to find some sort of craft store--maybe this weekend.  We got internet installed and we have a phone number.  We don't feel as isolated now that we have internet and can communicate via email.  Phone calls are expensive, I think.  We've got workers in the house today finishing up a few things. 


Our Apartment

I will take public transit for my first time today to pick up the kids from school.  It is a longer trip than we had planned--at 55 minutes to get to the school.  It is only a 10-15 minute drive, so I may want to buy a car after all.  I had orginally thought that there would be no need, but that is a long time to get to and from the school.  There is a Valentine's program in Kindergarten and I'm sure there are other things to do at the school, so I may spend quite a bit of time there.  The ride to and from school took 2 1/2 hours.  The kids got to ride the public transit for the first time.  I managed to get them on all the right buses and trolleys going in the right direction (on the way to pick them up, I had a small mishap and ended up going the wrong direction.  By the time I realized it, we were already at the end of the line and it just started over, going in the right direction, so no worries.)

Our Backyard

 Our first Friday night here, we decided to take the kids out to an Austrian meal.  We went 2 doors down to the neighbors Heurigen.  These are little houses with restaurants in them.  They typically serve their local wine and have small assortments of food.  You know if they are open if they have an evergreen bough hanging by the door.  We had schnittzel and German potato salad.  We also tried their deep fried veggies (zucchini, cauliflower, mushrooms, green onions--these are large in size here, and eggplant) and their fried chicken.  We, of course, did not have the wine, but did have the Almdudler.  This is a local drink that is like gingeraled lemonade.  It's pretty good.  It kind of grows on you.  Another thing that we found that grows on you is a brand of yogurt that is so creamy and good.  They have vanilla and pineapple kiwi flavor with real fruit.  We learned that it is 10 percent milkfat.  No wonder it's so good!!