Travel blog

We visited the Urfahraner market on Saturday. A market it isn’t. More like a county fair. We were joined by new friends. Thank God Alison is good at making them. Without her we’d be very bored. And thank goodness these befriended friends are fun. Incriminating evidence to follow. The befriended friends come with kid-friends too. Fun to be had by the lot of us. Grown-up bunny-ear fun, and kid fun on the Autodrom (bumper cars)....

Linz was Hitler’s favorite town. It’s where he started and where he wanted to end up. Austria’s largest concentration camp, Mathausen, is close by. That’s where the granite was quarried for the Nibelungen bridge. We see it every day. We knew this about Linz. We talked about it before we moved here. Friends and family asked how that felt. They wondered if there is still anti-semitism here. It’s fine, we said....

I am on a work trip this week. Four of us. Visiting a satellite office in Klagenfurt so I can meet the team and join some planning sessions. We took a train here, which lasted five hours and went through the alps — but it was mostly dark and foggy. When the fog lifted, which happened a few times, I compared the countryside to places in America. The mountains look like the rockies — big peaks and spires....

We are ahead of ourselves. We want to be here in April 2020, not September. In April 2020 the kids will take the tram by themselves. They will have strong friendships. Alison and I will understand the healthcare system, and know enough German to order a sandwich without having to point. But it’s September, not April. We’ll have to wait for the sun and moon to come and go a hundred and fifty times....

Lots of rap lyrics talk about benzos. Mercedes benzos. Nice cars. Just rented my second one from the Hertz in downtown Linz. A triple upgrade from the Ford Fiesta, but no rate change. Just €32 a day. That’s how we roll. I rolled it all the way home. We rent cars to transport things we can’t carry, and to get out of town. Driving around is pretty easy. The signs are a little different of course — and there are no yellow lines — only white....

I can’t understand a word these people are saying. I do understand them on other levels. They stack wood like it’s an art form. I am sure I would do the same, if I had wood to stack. Their toilets have a little shelf so they can examine their poop. I have similar interests. They have a sensitive nose for mustard, which is my favorite condiment, and maybe my favorite food....

The basics are in place. Kids have beds and bed frames. We do too. Everyone has a place to put their clothes. There is a dining room table with some temporary folding chairs. A desk in Zoe’s room and some bedside tables. The bathroom has a new washer & dryer wedged between the sink and shower. They are supposed to stack, but they don’t stack very well, and this works — at least for now....

We put new SIM cards in our phones. The carrier is Hofer Telecom. It’s a grocery store and a cell phone company. The plan is $10 a month for 15 gigs of data and unlimited calls. I am not sure which I enjoyed more — firing AT&T or Comcast. Cable Internet is $39 a month for 100 gigabits, by the way. Now we have these weird (to us) phone numbers that start with +43 — the Austrian country code....

Warning. These posts are never proofread. They will have plenty of misspellings and grammatical errors. Verklagen Sie mich (sue me)! Tomorrow will be one week in Linz, Austria. We live in an apartment on Spazenhofstraße, a quiet street on the Postlingberg Tram line. Our building has five ground level apartments, each with two floors, and five balcony apartments along the top. The balcony apartment above us is occupied by Herig and Inga who looked down on us from the street as we waved hello....