Salzburg!!

Since Anne's hip replacement was postponed, we decided to head off to Salzburg for the weekend. It was so beautiful! We decided to again take the train. The girls really prefer the train, and the cost is the same as driving (thanks to our awesome family rail pass!), so train it was.

We took an 8:30 train and were in Salzburg by noon. After checking in to our hotel and playing with my little ponies for a bit we headed out to explore the city. Ok, we had to drag the girls out. They would be totally happy to just ride on the train and stay in hotels all day. They don't mind a little sightseeing, but they would be happy to dispense with it. Well, we have a trick worked out: we starve them out of the room! Ha ha ha! Evil genius.

Actually, all 4 of us were starving, so the first thing we did was find a restaurant and order the family platter.

We have a new policy about always ordering the family platter (with a side of fries!). They're enormous and so, so good. This one had schnitzel, pork with gravy, venison stew, potatoes and dumplings. So delicious.

Then we continued our exploration. It was overcast and cool, but not cold, and we ended up finding this narrow little flight of stairs. We went up. It turned a corner, then up, then another corner. Before we realized it, we were half way up the mountain to the castle, and we decided what he heck, we'll walk all the way up. There was a funicular we could have taken ("I want to take the funiclear!" Maggie whined. Pronounced fun-ick-lee-er. Cute!)

Eventually we got to the castle. What a view from up there!!

Unfortunately, the camera ran out of batteries, so we only got a few photos. It was getting dark anyway though.

Oh, a funny I almost forgot: If you looked to the right of where Nick and the girls are standing, you'd see some beautiful mountains. We spent some time just enjoying the view, and at one point I started to sing:
"The hills are alive..."
and Nina continued, in the same melody,
"No! They are not.."
Ha! What a funny kid!

After some more dinner, we went back to the hotel and passed out. That castle was really high, it must have been the equivalent of at least 30 flights of stairs! WHY must they always build these castles on hilltops? If I lived back then, I'd say no way. Well, the good news is that the beds were super comfy and we all passed out and slept wonderfully.

After breakfast in the morning (free breakfast is a must for us, even if it's just a cold European breakfast) we went to mass at one of the 50 churches in Salzburg. Ok not 50, but you can't throw a stone in that city without hitting another church. You wouldn't think you'd need so many, but there it is.

I don't have any pictures of the inside of the church we chose (which I believe was called the Franziskanerkirche or Franciscan church), but it was strange. It appeared to be an absolutely lovely Gothic style church that got an incomplete Baroque facelift.

Here's a photo I found online. It's got a funny fish-eye effect going on, but you can see what I'm talking about:

See how at the very bottom it's got a Baroque addition, plus a very obviously added-on Baroque altar, but then it's Gothic the rest of the way up? Very strange. Maybe they'd have had more money for a complete facelift if they didn't have 49 other churches to divide the money between.

How petty of me to complain. We only got about a third of the way through mass before Maggie had to go to the bathroom, so that was that. Oh well, we tried.

It was a much sunnier day, so we took some more pictures:

walked around some more, and then hopped on the train back home.

All in all a busy but fun weekend!

Photos as promised!

Looking back through the blog as I'm wont to do, I've noticed that I often promise photos that never appear. Sorry about that! I totally forget most of the time. But not this time! Here are some of the funny photos from the girls' camera:

This child is hysterical

I'm so pretty!

Love this pose

I'm not sure what was going on here. I'll have to ask the girls.

This is a picture of a ghost. So say the girls anyway. One of their favorite things to do on a train is to try to capture pictures of "ghosts." This one was caught on the way home from Prague. Proof of the paranormal or lens flare? Definitely the former!

Well I was going to post some pictures from the girls camera

But Blogger isn't working right, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. Poop! They're hysterical.

I'm not even sure if this is going to post, I just got an error message when it tried to auto-save. Well, I'll hedge my bets, not spend too much time typing, and just say look out tomorrow for some funny pics!

The girls and I have a new bonding ritual

We go to Yahoo!'s omg! (pronounced ohmmguh, not oh-em-gee. Not in this house!) and look at the "what were they thinking" photo galleries. It's like a celebrity worst-dressed photo gallery. Well, not like a celebrity worst-dressed photo gallery. That's exactly what it is.

Looking through the pictures with the girls is hysterical. Maggie squeals things like "Oh no she haven't. Oh no she have not!" and Nina yells, "scroll down so we can see her shoes!" Both chorus "Oh em gee!" "What was she thinking," and (my personal favorite) "Cover your eyes! Cover your eyes!"

I'm also happy to report that I'm teaching them both to be horrified by ugly celebrity legs and knees. Because if you pay attention to celebrity legs, you'll notice that pretty much every one of them has a horrific pair of gams. I'm thinking it's from being way too thin. But, ugh, they need to cover those bad boys up.

It's hysterical though. It's becoming my favorite way to veg out on the couch with them.

Hm, what else is new? I'm making some friends! There's a group of parents who go to that playground next to Maggie's school pretty much every night, and since we've been going there pretty much every night, I'm getting to know them. One of them is Maggie's hater's mom and dad, another is the mother of a different classmate of Maggie's (not one of her haters), and the third set has 4 kids, none of whom go to Maggie or Nina's schools. Interestingly, I noticed for the first time today that they have identical triplet girls. Crazy! You'd think I'd have noticed that sooner, and I did find it confusing playing tag with them, but I just kind of assumed that they were close-in-age sisters who looked a lot alike. When I saw them come into the playground though, I realized what was going on. Yeah, I'm not the swiftest. :-)

None of them are native Austrians, they're all from the former Yugoslavia. I don't know which part, and I don't want to guess. That's generally a bad idea, because you know, you don't want to mistake a Serb for a Croat, you know what I mean? Lovely people though. A few of them speak English as well as I speak German, but since German isn't a first language for any of them either, I feel much less nervous about trying to speak it. So, that's been fun.

Oh, so we were playing tag yesterday at the playground, and Maggie said that all of the play structures were base. Except she pronounced it "play structions." So cute!

I love the things I overhear when these kids play

I was hanging out in my bedroom reading early this afternoon while the girls were in the living room playing with the chestnuts they've gathered. I heard Nina say to Maggie,
"Do you believe in the American flag?"
"Yes!" squealed Maggie. "I've seen that before! Why in my whole life would I not believe in the American flag?"
"Do you believe in yourself?"
"Yes, of course! I've looked in the mirror many times!"
"Do you believe in the Austrian flag?"
"No, I haven't seen one."
"Well, it's real."
"Well, don't care."

I was cracking up by this point and writing the conversation down, because it was just too funny to forget. Apparently the conversation started because they were drawing on the chestnuts, pretending they were decorating Easter eggs, and Nina asked Maggie if she believed in the Easter bunny (no) or Bigfoot (also no).

I couldn't resist asking Maggie whether she believed in the Great Pumpkin, even though she's never seen that Charlie Brown show.

"Well I never in my whole life heard of the great pumpkin," was the response.

We had a mostly lounge around the house kind of day. Nina was tired and just wanted to relax. We took them to a new playground in the next town over (well, not new new, just new to us) in the late afternoon and it was fantastic. The highlights were a little, hilly bike trail/loop that kids could ride on (we didn't bring Nina's bike this time, we'll have to next time) and a huge sandbox fed with plenty of water by a spigot on top of a small hill next to it. Messy, but tons of fun.

Playground yesterday

There's a playground right next to Maggie's school that the girls love to play at. We've started going there about twice a week in the afternoons. It's nice and usually filled with kids. Maggie's hater is nearly always there. It's really a shame that Maggie hates her hater, because I really like his mom. She's a total sweetheart, she's patient when I try to speak German, and her English is really good. But I think getting together would be a disaster.

Maggie's hater is only 3 1/2, and I think he enjoys provoking Maggie. Yesterday he came up to her at the playground and touched her. She gave him the evil eye and pushed him away. He pushed her back, she pushed harder and started screaming. Luckily I quickly intervened. Before this, I was trying to convince Maggie that she didn't hate the kid and that she just felt neutral about him. I think any progress I made was wiped out in that exchange.

However, it was really exciting to hear Nina converse with another little girl. They were just talking about simple things--how old they were and stuff. When the little girl asked Nina "In welcher klasse bist du?" (What grade are you in?) Nina responded "Zweiter" (which means second. Or as Maggie would say, twoth).

I was so proud of her! It's just a simple exchange and she's can say much more, but this is pretty much the limit of what I can understand, remember for a day, and then reproduce here, so you'll have to take what you can get. :-)

Two other kids from Maggie's preschool were there yesterday too, which was good. Maggie has been slow to form friendships with the other kids, and the more time she has to play with them, the better. As soon as we walked in to the playground, a bunch of them shouted, "Hello Maggie!" This happens often when I'm walking along with Nina too. A little kid on a bike or scooter will zip by and shout, "Hello Anina!" I love it!

Not much to report...

School is, on the whole, continuing to go well. Maggie is excited to go every morning, but still needs me to hang around for about 15 minutes and color with her first thing, so that she can adjust to being there. No big deal, though, I've colored some fantastic pictures. Last week I did a rendition of dogs playing poker, only with ponies. It's hanging up on my bedroom wall now, but I can indulge you with a picture if you'd like. Today Maggie requested I draw ponies playing cars, so I did. Not quite as artistically inspired as my cards scene, but interesting nonetheless. Anyway, she's still staying for between an hour and an hour and a half. Generally she runs over to me when I pick her up and almost starts to cry. I give her a hug, she tells me she missed me (near tears) then quickly hops down from my arms and runs off to show me what she's done that day. By the time we're actually heading out the door she's all smiles and see-you-tomorrows. The articles on the web say it's common for kids to cry at pickup even if they've had great days just because they're a little emotionally overwhelmed. But it's important to remember that it doesn't mean they didn't have a great time.

Nina is likewise a little hot and cold on school. She'll often say before bed and in the morning that she doesn't want to go, or that she remembers how nervous she felt in the first few days and that makes her nervous again. Last week I told her about this woman I read about in yahoo who went to the doctor complaining of ear pain, and it turned out she had a spider in her ear. It had been there for like a week. The yahoo article even included a picture of the spider within the ear, how unnecessary is that? So I asked Nina, I bet you'd rather be going to school today than have a spider in your ear, right? And she agreed. Perspective. There's always someone out there worse off than you.

It kind of worked, except now we have to pretend the ponies have spiders in their ears all the time. In a funny way though, not in a scary way. So it's all good.

And to think no one has awarded me mother of the year yet... I've been robbed.