December 27th-January 8th (Austrian chocolate, stupid cats and risk-free lentil soup)

Snow. Lots of snow. And it was cold. Very cold. My sister went skiing in Switzerland with a friend of hers, so at the beginning it was just my parents and I. We went and stayed at the house of our friends in Hallein. The first thing I was greeted with when I came in the door were two cats. They looked like fairly nice cats, cute and all that, not to bad tempered by the seems of it. I wanted to be introduced to my new house mates and so I inquired to Karl, one of the people we were staying with, what the names of the cats were. "There are three," he said, "I think that one is the fat one, and that one is the stupid one, the nice one is outside." Very practical, the Austrians.

We spent a good deal of time relaxing, just watching movies and long runs of Law and Order. We established a favourite snitzel restaurant, where the platter for two easily feeds 20. We also went for a few walks around the town. Oh and of course the part my dad said we couldn't miss, the chocolate factory where you could buy Austrian chocolate cheep in bulk. The chocolate later caused me signifigant distress when I was in Kenya, but more on that later. 

The eventful part of my trip was definitely new years. Our friends invited friends of there's, I Hungarian couple and their son Tamas. That's right, Hungarian. We're all going to wake up one morning and discover that the world has been taken over by them. Anyway, so we all had dinner, fondu and sexist potato salad, one type for the men and one for the women. But this was far from a normal dinner. Between the nine people sitting at the table, there was not a common language. Everyone but me spoke German, all but four people spoke Hungarian and all but two peoples spoke English. Two of the company spoke all three. No this is not an IQ test. Having said this, this meant that most times at the table everyone was speaking at least two different languages amongst themselves. This made for very...interesting conversation.

The evening was pleasant, and at about 10:30 the daughter Lisa asked Tamas and I if we'd like to go to a party with them. Having had a couple glasses of champagne, I thought this was a great idea. So we put on some warm clothes and went to a sort of Austrian get together, nothing overly rowdy. They made killer punch. So Tamas and I just hung out and talked until midnight, at which point everyone went outside and set off rockets. Not the pathetic little fireworks that have now been banned in Victoria, but the real ones, the ones they set off on Canada day. And they were everywhere. All around the house these huge fireworks were going off everywhere. It went on for like, 45 minutes. 

That's when the evening gets a little unusual. Its about 12:30am, and Tamas says "Oh yeah, we're going to my parents house now to eat lentil soup." And I'm like, hold on what now? Apparently, there is a Hungarian tradition (which I, being Hungarian, never knew about) that the first thing that one has to eat on new years in Lentil soup, otherwise you'll have bad luck. And apparently the soup could not be made and brought over to where we were staying, because it is also apparently bad luck to transport the soup. Nothing strange about that what so ever. So anyway, we head over to his parents place, at about one in the morning, and there all sitting there, my father and Karl included, waiting to eat this soup. So we sit down, chatting and what not, and eat our risk-free lentil soup. Then we headed home and I crashed.

Another interesting thing we did in Austria was go to the restaurant that the guy who created red bull owns. Its called Hanger 7 and the food is very good. It also has a bunch of planes and race cars and stuff. Pretty neat place. Other than that the trip was interlaced with shopping at H&M, going to a spa and playing worm killing computer computer games on Tamas' computer. All and all a successful trip.