Anyway, after I returned home from Ski Camp, I had no school for the week because my class was in London. On Thursday, my host family flew to London for the weekend in order to pick up my host sister Chiara, who is home now for the rest of the year. On Thursday I departed to Retz in Upper Austria (about 1 1/2 hour away from Vienna) to stay with Claudia until my host family got back on Tuesday.
Thursday: celebrated St. Patrick's Day in Vienna
this kind Irish woman was walking around the bar soliciting "authentic hats" she brought with her from Ireland, and face painting
Saturday: went to Vienna with Claudia, Tamara, Adam, Mauricio, Georgina, Tom, Malena, and Sam. We went to Naschmarkt which basically a flea market with a lot of food options. We ate really good noodle boxes, got compliments shouted at us from merchants desperate for our business, ate some good gelato, and bought matching bracelets for three Euros that ended up falling apart two days later. I got my hair chopped off, and Claudia and Tamara got themselves some highlights with some box dye we found at Bipa :)
before and after of my hair - wasn't a "new hair new me" thing, it was just getting tangled and caught in anything that came within two feet of me, and I didn't want a pool drain to be next
Sunday: Claudia's host mom joined us in the Czech Republic, which is about 10 minutes away from Retz by train. We walked around a town called Znojmo and struggled to order food because we know no Czech. Since we are so poor and were unable to communicate, we ended up just taking pictures of each other like the white teenage girls we are to instill Instagram envy in the hearts of our followers.
Monday: got a tour of Austria's largest historical wine cellar and the town's windmill
Laid low on Wednesday, went to a pajama party Thursday night with some school friends, and chilled Friday. Saturday the Easter celebrations began. In Carinthia, Easter is celebrated on Saturday. (Which still doesn't make sense to me - Jesus was dead for three days, so why are we skipping a day of mourning?? Jesus was still dead on Saturday, why would we celebrate that???? It is truly a mystery to me.)
I joined my host family in a town called Vorndernberg in Styria, where we met with my host aunt, her boyfriend, host cousins, and some other family friends. We celebrated in the mountains, in what seemed to me an aristocratic hunting lodge.
Napoleon wrote on this table
Our dinner was a lot different from what I'm used to eating for Easter: wurst (sausage), cold cuts of ham, bacon, and salami, white and schwarzbrot (black bread) and a lot of spreadable cremes for the bread, as well as hard boiled eggs and Reindling, which is a traditional Carinthian Easter cake that is extremely delicious and I ate a lot of it.
Another very different tradition was the Easter fire. It was a bonfire that was burned for most of the night. We drove back to Carinthia that night, and we could see everyone else's Easter fires burning in the fields as well. Cool stuff.
And right now, the mom of my host brother Aurel, who is living with my family in Montana, is visiting this week. I got to Skype with all of them. (Which was really weird, let me tell you - I've met with and stayed with Aurel's family a few times in Vienna and then seeing Alexandra in my house with my family was rather strange. Cool, but strange.) So that's what I've been up to. The month of April will include a host family change, a weekend trip to Budapest with Rotary, and the beginning of Euro-Tour.
Happy Easter / Frohe Ostern!!
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