Day 55: I love the way these kids play

I've been meaning to do a post on this, so I guess now's the time.

The girls come up with the funniest things to play and the funniest names for their toys. One barbie doll with a mountain of hair on her head has been dubbed "La Hair-a-lotta." Every time I hear it, I crack up. It's perfect! She has a lot of hair!

La Hairalotta's boyfriend is fashionista Ken, who's been renamed HoHak. I am sure about the spelling of that one because Nina wrote it out. They were drawing pictures (LOTS of pictures!), and there was one guy with short hair (Nina's art is getting very good, but Maggie's is still fairly rudimentary, and hair is a big clue as to who she's drawing.)

"Oh, is this one papa I asked?"
"No!" said Nina, "It's HoHak!"

And sure enough, HoHak was written up top. How could I have missed that?

Last night Maggie was looking through the iPod and talking about BeeBious Cole. I've heard this name before and asked her, who's BeeBious Cole? She told me it's a show that the newborn twins watch.

The newborn twins are a bit of a misnomer, because there's not just two of them. Any small ponies are newborn twins. I just asked the girls how many newborn twins they have and they said simultaneously, "A lot!"

This morning Nina explained that BeeBious Cole is a show for babies starring a foot and a shoe that they film on the iPod and play for the newborn twins.

And of course we can't forget ponies like Pizza Dough, Serena and Satreensa. Add to that that half the time still, their play is in opera (or perhaps operatta is the proper term?), and it all adds up to a whole lot of funny around here!

Day 52: A beautiful night

It's cool and clear outside tonight, and Nina and I were lying on her bed tonight with the window open, a gentle breeze against our skin, looking out at the waxing moon.

"Do you see those dark spots on the moon?" asked Nina.
"I do," I said. I held myself back from launching immediately into an explanation of how they appear darker because they're areas of high-frequency meteorite impact, resulting in densely packed craters. I wanted to give her a chance to tell me about them. The child the teacher, the mother the student. We were having a moment don't you know.
"That's where the robots live," she finished.

I couldn't just let that one float by, of course, so I pressed for details.
"The robots?" It was a gentle press.
"Yeah," she said. "They fly around the Earth and space, but the only place they land on is the dark spots on the moon."
"How do you know?" I asked. "Did you learn this in school?"
"No," she said, "I just figured it out on my own."

That kid. She cracks me up.

On a slightly less PC note, we got a can of lychee fruit (in heavy syrup!) with our last delivery of Chinese food. Nina wanted to eat some, but I was skeptical. I told her I don't know, it's from China, they have so many chemical and heavy metal contamination issues. And she said, But they eat it in China, right? And I said yeah. And she said, Is that why they talk like chung dow sho fu ying?

I cracked up! I guess that's not un-PC, I mean Chinese does sound very different from the Germanic languages.

In less entertaining news, poor Maggie has been constipated since I think last Wednesday. She's been pooping, but they've been hard and difficult to pass. We tried giving her one over the counter product, and I'm not going to get into it right now, but let's just say that while fructose and glucose sound similar, you can't just substitute one for the other in a chemical formula and think you're gonna get the same end product. Because you won't. Austria.

Finally though, we got her an actual laxative yesterday. She had one more difficult poop, a second dose, and she's been comfortable ever since.

Poor little kid though, she was very upset. She's never been constipated, and I wonder if it was from this stomach bug we seem to have. It's hard to tell... we've all had mild tummy aches at one point or another over the past week, with the exception of me being in serious pain one night last week. If it is a virus, it's an odd one. Or maybe it's just one of those things that happens to kids sometimes.

Regardless of why it happened, we had to stay close to home all day today while we waited for the laxative to work. But the kids played outside, and inside, and colored a lot, so it was still fun. Hopefully we can get out tomorrow, but I'll have to wait and make sure the laxative has stopped working. So I'm thinking it'll be another day close to home.

Day 50: Fun with friends in Vienna

But first, wow, 50 days! Nearly 1/7 of the way through our year! Not that I'm counting the days until we're back in Maine. Fresh, cool, sweet-smelling Maine... At least there are no mosquitoes in Austria! Whenever I miss Maine, I think about the mosquitoes. Then I don't miss it so much!

Today we went to Vienna to hang out at some playgrounds with our friends Suzy and Manfred. (You might remember Suzy's parents Sissy and Hank from our wedding. Nice folks. They've been friends with Anne and Fritz for years). Well, Suzy and her husband have 2 girls and a boy, and the kids play really well together. We hit up two new (to us) playgrounds in Vienna and the girls had a blast. Great dangerous, fun playgrounds, not the rubber, plastic, and safety-obsessed ones like we have in the US, that's another thing that I like more about Austria.

After a few hours of play, the 8 of us went out for some pizza. What a fun day!

It was much cooler today, cooler than was forecast even. Which was a nice break, because yesterday was just sweltering. Tomorrow's supposed to be cool and raining all day, hooray! I've had enough of the summer here and am happily awaiting fall.

Yesterday was a lazy day, the kids mostly hung out around here and with their friends in the building. Einstein has been replaced as reptilian mascot of the 5th floor by a newt that Ivan and Luca from across the hall have captured and been keeping as a pet. The girls love him. His name is Fluffy. My German isn't good enough to find out why. They bring Fluffy with them wherever they go in this plastic pail, and if he gets loose in my apartment, I'm giving up. Well, he's so small that any crickets that may have escaped and taken up residence in my walls could probably eat him for dinner. Ha ha!

Day 48: Back to the Belvedere

But first, let me say how much I love downloading pics from the camera after Nina's been using it unsupervised.

Artsy Shimmer says "It's nice to meet you.'
I think that's shimmer anyway. I can't keep up. It's bad enough that there are 40 ponies with different names, but I think they change sometimes. Like, when did Elizabeth get on the scene? I think she was renamed. I'd ask, but I'd just end up even more confused.

One more:

This is a fantastic picture of Maggie. Well done Nina! She took it while we were eating lunch at the Belvedere (grilled cheese with ham for the girls, gazpacho for me, and coffee with leftover grilled cheese for Nick). And that's my segue back into our day...
We went back today because if you recall, we'd bought the combination tickets for the upper and lower Belvedere when we were there 2 weeks ago. You have two weeks to use the tickets, so it was today or never. Also, today was the coolest day of the week (it's been in the 90s, and the high today was only supposed to be in the 80s. I think we did stay there after all, thanks to the thin cloud cover we had most of the day). When you're taking the un-air conditioned Badener Bahn to and from the city, you definitely need to avoid the 90 degree days.

We wanted to get there early because they have "medieval treasures" that on display in the palace stables, but only until noon. Somehow, we'd gotten the impression that there was at least one crown on display, but alas, that was a mistake. The treasures were of the "religious art" variety, you can guess how excited the kids were.

But, no loss, we were mainly there to see the upper Belvedere anyway. And it was gorgeous!

No cameras allowed inside, sorry. It's an art museum, but many of the rooms had descriptions of what they were originally used for, so it still held some of the appeal of a palace. Nina was satisfied, anyway. We saw some great pieces--a Van Gogh, a Monet, and lots of Klimt (including The Kiss). The girls gave it a thumbs up. I asked Maggie what she'd pay for one of Klimt's portraits and she said, "Fifty." That's a lot of money to a little kid, so she must have liked it!.
Sorry for no posts lately, I had a stomach ache this week. Poor me! Hopefully just a stomach bug, but it did feel an awful lot like the pain I had way back when I probably had an ulcer. :-(

Day 45: Burgruine Rauheneck

Desiree translation: Rauheneck castle ruins.

It was impossible to get the entire castle in a photo, but here are the girls on the wooden bridge that you must cross to enter the castle. According to the German wikipedia, which I let Google translate (so unreliable, hire professionals for your translations and pay them well!), that bridge has always been the way to enter the castle. Well, not that bridge. A bridge.
The castle was not as well preserved as Rauhenstein, which, fun!, we could see from the hike up:

The girls, by the way, are excellent hikers. Nina always asks "are we there yet" as soon as we get started, and Maggie always makes fun of her by asking "are we there yet?" as soon as we start back down (I know she's making fun of Nina, because when she asked the question and I said "No, not yet," she said, "I know, I'm just making fun of Nina. She always asks 'are we there yet,' at the beginning of the hike.") Those two are a riot!
Back to the castle: It was built in the 12th century by the Familie der Rauhenecker (who shortly thereafter started calling themselves the Tursens). Oh! Here's a picture of the ruins that we took from Rauhenstein a few weeks back:

So you can see that it's not as well preserved as Rauhenstein. Still, it was very cool. It's been in ruins since the Turks destroyed it in 1529, who am I to judge its condition. If my house was sacked 500 years ago, I'm sure there'd be nothing at all left today.
Here's a few pictures from the chapel, which was the best preserved room (next to the keep, of course, which is coming)

Can you see the crucifix well above Maggie's head there? I presume that was added recently.

I love seeing little details like parts of hinges still in the stone where doors were, remnants of chimneys, or the holes in the walls where wooden beams were fixed to make the second floor. I have a bunch more photos, which I'll put on Facebook.
The highlight of this castle was the keep which is, interestingly, shaped as an isosceles triangle. It's in fantastic shape, and sometime in the last 100 years someone built wooden stairs so you can get to the top (well, according to the feel of those stairs, I'd guess sometime in the last 200 years!). This keep was also partitioned into "floors," by which I mean a wooden floor was built every 20 feet or so, so that you don't have the terrifying experience of climbing rickety wooden stairs and being able to look 60 feet straight down. In exchange, you get the terrifying experience of climbing up 5 flights of stairs in near total darkness.

The unsuspecting family, about to enter the tower of terror!
But the view from the top... Wow is it worth it!

Day 44: Burg Liechtenstein

Wow.

This was exactly the castle experience we've been searching for. We didn't even know it existed until yesterday, and it was just fantastic.

But first, a little background. The castle was built 900 years ago, by a man named Hugo von Petronell. "Liechtenstein" literally means "bright stone," and Hugo apparently changed his name to Liechtenstein after building the castle. Or while building it. I guess he liked it better than von Petronell? The castle was destroyed by the Ottomans in the 1500s, laid in ruins for centuries, and then in the 1880s it was bought back by the ruling family of Liechtenstein. I suppose this means that this is the castle that gave the Liechtenstein family, and thus the country of Liechtenstein, their name. Unless someone along the way was just confused by the coincidence ("How many Liechtensteins can there be?" someone once said long ago. "It's got to be ours!") It was restored and enlarged, and decorated in the way the castle renovators of the 1880s thought a Romanesque castle looked. Ever since its renovation, it has been used as a museum. There's no heat, electricity, or plumbing in the castle, so even Nina says she wouldn't care to live there. Probably.

Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures from inside the castle. They don't allow any. So here are some more pictures from the outside:

This one was taken outside of the entrance. The tower that you see directly above Maggie's head is the chapel tower. The tour guide told us we couldn't go up there because the tower didn't pass city inspection for large groups. I guess stone and mortar isn't as stable as steel reinforced concrete after all.


We did go inside the chapel itself, which was very small. There was an interesting and very small red chalk drawing of a crucifix with Mary and I want to say John, but I don't remember. It was made when the chapel was first built or shortly thereafter, and this is remarkable because chalk shouldn't last that long. The tour guide referred to that as "really miraculous," but I don't think it's a church sanctioned miracle. Still, very cool.


Other highlights inside the castle included Austria's oldest bed. Not very comfy looking! It was actually more like a semi-circle about two feet deep in the wall. But they didn't lie down to sleep on this bed, because people didn't lie down to sleep at all in that day (!!!!!). They sat in it! Why did they sleep sitting up? Because they didn't have a lot of clean water to drink, you know, and so they drank a lot of wine. And the wine in the day, besides having a high alcohol content, was very acidic. So, people threw up a lot in their sleep, and so they'd sleep sitting up so that they didn't aspirate their vomit.


What!! The more I learn about history, the more I am happy to live in the here and now. Oh, and also they thought lying down was for dead people, and since lying down to sleep did cause death, I guess they were right. Even the king and queen would sleep like this! Drunkenness for all!


Another interesting tidbit was that the castle's bare, stone walls are an inaccurate representation of the Romanesque time. By the 1100s, they had figured out that wood panelling kept the castle warmer, so that was de rigeur. I didn't know that. I always pictured castles as having bare stone walls, with maybe some tapestries to keep them warmer.


From the top floor of the castle, which was only added in the 1880 renovation, we could see Vienna and I think all the way to Bratislava, but really who can tell. Here, see for yourself!

Well, it's hard to see. Photos of the distance never come out well. It's just one of those things that you have to see on your own. But the girls look awfully cute, so the picture stays!

Here's a picture from what's maybe the courtyard, instead:

Alright, bed time for me. There's probably more that I should remember, but it's almost midnight, and we went to a Heurigen for dinner with some friends of ours (Nick's old friend Any, his wife Uli, and their son Alexander) after the castle, so I am beat!

Day 42: Crickets

or, The Great Escape

Here's the long story, with I'm sure tangential rants and digressions galore. OMG, I just hate tangential rants and digressions! It's like when--KIDDING! Ha!

So, guess who always has to catch the crickets to feed to the gecko because her spouse won't go near them? Oh, I gave it away there, didn't I? It was a rhetorical question anyway, because obviously it's the mom. That goes without saying with pets I'm learning (guess how excited I am to get a dog after this gecko experience?)

Well, last night was feed the gecko night, and Nina was helping me (dear, sweet Nina. She really wants to take over feeding the gecko, she gives me hope that I won't be doing all of the work when we get a dog after all). But, the crickets are disgusting, and she just can't bring herself to stick her hands in their tank, pick up one of their disgusting, cricket-poo covered toilet paper roll hides, and shake them into the empty butter tub (because that's how it's done. Then, for the record, one must quickly put the lid on and shake, because one has already added the powdered gecko vitamins to the butter tub, and one wants the crickets coated in the powder. I don't even want to know what all this stuff costs).

ANYWAY, there's like 30 crickets in this tiny tank, and there's poo on the toilet paper rolls (at least, that's what I assume it is), and it smells, and Nina doesn't want to stick her hands in there. Neither do I for that matter, but I do. But this time, a cricket jumped on my thumb and just as quickly jumped from there clear onto the floor! I was startled and dropped the butter tub into the tank. I intended to quickly capture the escaped cricket, but then the crickets all went crazy. Popping around like mad in that tank. Then two jumped up and landed on the edge of the tank, and I screamed, and yelled to Nick to get something to catch them in. The girls, panic-stricken, ran and hid in the kitchen. Nick likewise sprinted for some tupperware (for catching crickets, of course).

The first guy that leapt from my thumb was on the floor, and we got him easily. But the two that jumped after that were much harder. One was under the dresser the tank is on, and started climbing up the wall. The other was stuck in this weird tank lip that I'm not even going to try to describe. Just trust me that it was impossible for me to catch it, but it was possible that he could jump out. So I trapped him for the moment with some paper.

We focused on trying to catch the cricket who was now underneath the dresser. Also, I am mistaken. There was a fourth cricket on top of the dresser which I caught under this little vase. It was such pandemonium that I forgot about him. Or her.

By now the girls, still anxious, had come back to the living room to see what was going on. Nina was worried that the crickets were going to live in the walls and start chirping, because we were warned that this could happen.

Well, there was a final capture attempt, a miss, some profanity and blame. Marital tensions rose. Then 5 minutes later Nick found the missing cricket down the hall on the way to the kitchen, and he was fed to the gecko like the rest.

Then, I somehow managed (brilliantly, if I don't say so myself) to get the cricket in the stupid lip part of the tank to crawl onto some paper, and quickly trapped him in the faithful old butter tub. Crisis averted!

Really, I am so done with this gecko. Two more days!!