Getting Settled...

March 13, 2010

The strawberries are from Spain, the oranges are from Greece.  The kiwi fruit and the tomatoes are from Italy.  The cheese is imported from Holland; it is Gouda and seems absurdly inexpensive.  The bread and the yogurt are from Austria.  My kids are instant fans of the fresh bread rolls called Semmeln -- crusty on the outside but fresh and soft on the inside.  The delicious yogurt will also be a staple, and will be tried and enjoyed in many different flavors.   But it is the Fruechtetee (fruit tea) that I have been craving and will perhaps enjoy the most:  a delectable combination of hibiscus, apple, orange, lemon, and berries all wrapped up in a tiny little tea bag…  with a solid 2- or 3-year shelf life.  The tea will be coming home to California with me.

We came home with four bags of groceries on our first visit to the store.  (There are actually three small grocery stores within a block or two of our apartment, which is excellent since we don’t have a car.)  Cade, Regan and Reyna thought it was great fun and quickly caught on to the shopping-by-pictures and Euros pricing.  We didn’t catch on quite as fast to the checkout process, which looks deceptively like bag-your-own-groceries in the U.S., except twice as speedy and much more intense.  After causing a 20-customer pile-up at the single checkout stand, we now know that most people only buy two to five items per visit (probably because there is no room in their mini-refrigerators!), and groceries are not bagged at the check-out (you shovel them back into your cart as quickly as possible and then bag them in a separate area at your leisure).  No one threw anything or swore at us; they were probably just fascinated by the spectacle we created.  I’ll just file that one under “learning experience” and figure we’re now good-to-go.       

After the shopping debacle, we were off to explore the city… or at least a very small part of it.  The kids were overjoyed to discover that Austria is just like Switzerland… so far as its fun and potentially hazardous playground equipment is concerned.  Eventually I was able to drag them away for a tour of Karlskirche, a large Baroque-style church completed in 1737.  Once again we found ourselves climbing stairs as we went up scaffolding to the very top of the center dome (72 meters?  The stairs get you so close you can almost touch the frescoes on the ceiling).  Despite a few unnerving moments when the scaffolding seemed a bit insecure (there is no one on duty to monitor compliance with the “Danger:  no more than 10 persons on the scaffolding at one time” warning), the beautiful art and the city views from the top made it well-worth the effort and the acrophobic jitters.  But I think we'll take a few weeks off before tackling the 343 cathedral tower stairs at Stephansdom...