The long-awaited review of Salzburg

For over a month now I have been intending to write about my mom's visit and especially our time in Salzburg, but I have been plagued by overwhelming stress and laziness, and so have not taken the time until now to do so.

As my time here in Europe is winding to a close, I decided that it was mandatory for me to experience a sleeper train. So at the end of April I took a Friday night train to Salzburg, slept in a chair that reclined more than the normal seat, but nowhere close to a horizontal position, arrived having lost my copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood on the first and groggiest of my train changes, and met up with Drew and Lisa for breakfast. When I was last in Salzburg it was winter with a nice layer of cold on the ground and air which hurried you to your next destination in the hope of warming up again. Coffee was mandatory. This visit, in the early part of spring, was equally, but of course differently, stunning. From the minute you step out of the train station, the city is dominated by the fortress Hohensalzburg on top of a hill in the center of the city and green. Of the five days that I was there, four were warm and sunny to the point that I managed to get a sunburn and could constantly smell the sun on my skin.
I have utterly fallen in love Austria, and especially Salzburg. It is hard to resist the beauty and history that is Salzburg, but I think the thing that draws me so much to the place is the fact that it is a haven to me here in Europe. It has been a good year, but a very difficult one, and it has proven rather challenging to get breaks from my work here as an au pair. The fact that I live with the family I work for, in the very next room, has made it very hard for me to ever feel that I can completely relax and be on my own. I have not found here in Oldenburg someone with whom I can converse on the same level that I have been spoiled enough to hope for while living in Eugene, and there is not really anyone around who completely understands my perspective, not only as an America, but also as a Christian, and a not very conventional one at that. So when I get the opportunity to visit friends from Eugene, who live on this continent, I settle quite quickly into a feeling of deep comfort. It is not merely the fact that Drew and Lisa are from Eugene which makes them so dear to me, but I remember when I am around them what a rare thing it is to find people who are kind and thoughtful. Not thoughtful in the sense of kind because I'm not trying to be that redundant, but thoughtful in the sense of being people who actively think about things without even noticing it. That and Lisa's an incredible hostess and lots of fun to be around. And they have the most incredible marble-shower-with-three-different-sources-of-water-the-size-of-a-closet that I have ever seen.

Mom arrived on Sunday. I made the horrible mistake of being late to the train to pick her up which meant that I didn't know what platform she had arrived on (because the board had already moved on to the next batch of arrivals) and so I ran from one to the next searching for my mother while Drew waited patiently in his illegal parking spot until I found her surprisingly unfrazzled and brought her to the car. Poor thing though, it was her first trip to Europe, she was without my father (who has not only a former realtor's instinct for how to get where he wants to go in any town, which I think I might have inherited from him, but also that male courage which does not deign to find directions necessary) and although she had been guided through the basics of the European rail system by our friend Gabi, she was still on shaky ground with no one to meet her as she got off the train, no phone from which to call, or even a sure telephone number and only that vocabulary which is helpful in describing the color of cars in the native tongue. Her first look when I called her name was naturally one of relief, "Good. I learned to just stay put and when it gets dark get big, and someone will eventually find you, I'm not entirely sure that the method will work in a train station, but I had several hours before dark to figure that out." The next two days with Mom were a blast. By that time I knew my way around Salzburg well enough to bring her around to some of the highlights (most of which are sighted if you pay the 15 euros to take the Sound of Music Tour), and we spent our days wandering the town and country, talking and sipping coffee to forestall any caffeine withdrawal symptoms I might experience.

On Wednesday early in the afternoon, mom and I boarded an IC and later an ICE (those are the really nice trains where there are people in uniform who come by to sell you an overpriced cup of soaked coffee grounds), and headed back up to Oldenburg when she spent the next couple of days seeing my situation, my town and my life here, then I put her on a train back to Giessen with a tearful goodbye, and have spent the last month and a half trying to suppress my antsyness to see my friends and family again.

First things later.

Truly, this blog should be an update of my adventures in Salzburg, and an account of my mother's visit, including pictures and clever descriptions of my surroundings and the astonishingly wonderful weather, but it will not be. Today was Carolin's Geburtstag. She has finally entered her fifth year. I use the word finally not because I have watched her since childhood awaiting this day, but rather because the number of crossed-off days on the countdown calendar that I made for her nearly three weeks ago directly corresponds to the excitement that she has built up culminating in a day of romping about, eating treats, and the general frufurie which accompanies the birthday of a child. Six were invited (if you discount Anja, the former au pair, Felix, myself, and Holger and Sabine), but Lena is ill today; so we will give her the bag of party favors at Kindergarten when she is feeling better. The games included TP the parents (i.e. use most of the klo papier in the house to make them into mummies), bobbing for apples (Josie bobbed for a bananna because she's allergic to apples), search for your hand-picked prize in the garden while the kids shout warm oder kalt, and generally play in the sand, sun and grass. Although by the end of the day everyone agreed that it had been filled rather to the point of stuffing with activity, it was quite a glorious day. I had forgotten what it is like to be five and having a birthday; those days when to run in circles is seen as a prudent use of energy and a galaxy of fun!

Sunshine...

...has been witnessed in increasing proportions of the last few weeks, but only quite recently has the temperature cooperated with the trend toward spring in the area. This afternoon, as the entire family was away for a vacation, and I have not yet left for Salzburg, I reveled in the luxury of lying in the sun reading snippets of the introduction to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and dozing in an attempt to dispel the conviction that is being formed in the minds of my guest family that my skin is unable to show tokens contact with the sun. The only expression I can formulate for my gratitude that the sun has returned has already been formulated by Mr. Denver... "sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy; sunshine in my eyes can make me cry; sunshine on the water looks so lovely; sunshine almost always makes me high." There you have it. And now it's stuck in your head.

Orange

Abendbrot, the closing meal of open-faced sandwiches was surprisingly entertaining this evening. Of late, Carolin, Felix, and I have been the only consistent attendees with Holger and Sabine making appearances later or even after the fact. Regardless of this fact, the table gets set with three sets of adult dishes on a matching plastic plate and cup from Ikea for Carolin. After a tiring day of swimming and taking the bus back home, Carolin was quite tired and rather crabby. We had had a clash of will a little bit earlier which was magnified by the girl's hunger and exhaustion so I chose the orange set out of the cupboard to put at her place.
Carolin's favorite color when I arrived here ten months ago was pink. This girl has pink possessions up the wazoo. But then, for some unknown reason, a couple of months ago she changed her mind and is now all about orange. So it is not surprising that when I looked up from buttering my bread I was confronted with a tableau of orange. My natural response was to share my observation with Carolin in the hopes that we could be mutually delighted in the abundance of her shade of preference, "look at how much orange there is there. Your plate and cup are orange, you fleece is orange. There's orange everywhere." To which comment she replied in a manner quite understated and serious, "yes, I know. And my underwear is orange too."
A bit later, in a rather rare moment of explicit affection as we were talking about my name, she declared, "you are my only Valerie. There will not be another one, and I don't want another au pair, unless it's Anja again." (Anja was the au pair before me, who stayed with the family for two years, and still comes by the house every couple of weeks).
I just thought I would share with all of you the fact that as difficult as this experience has been for me, especially in my relationship with Carolin, there are still those sweet moments that give me a glimmering of a notion that it has been worthwhile.

Congratulations...

to my friends Colin, Summer and Indy, who welcomed Sabine Selby into their family yesterday. I'm excited to get to meet her and to hear more about how the family grows.

Silver and Gold

Well at least the first half of the phrase is spot on.
They say to, "make new friends, but keep the old..."
Yet I must contend with the rigid appearance of those minereal assignments.

The past several years proved the adage half false.
First glancing showed silver, but second showed platinum;
and that which I thought undoubtedly gold, was only the fool's variety.

Swimming and earphones

Today was the first day of Carolin's new swimming class. She's in the seahorse level at the University here in town. It was so strange walking through the locker room with her, Felix on my arm, and having memories from two very different periods of my life flash through my head. The older of the memories came from the days when I first started learning to swim at BSU in a class with my brother and my cousin. We would all shower in a group, then chatter out teeth across the slippery tiles to stand in the gutter next to the pool and await our turn to jump in to the waiting arms of the instructor and start swimming. Although I was even at a very young age a quite timid kid, I remember looking at the tall strong teachers and thinking they were the most wonderful people in the world, and swimming must be one of life's great accomplishments, because "hey look what I can do!" The other memory was from at least a decade later when I worked as a lifeguard at the YMCA and all the instructors were my buddies. In the break room we would compare notes about the fact that the parents where both horribly meddlesome in trying to tell the instructors how to teach their children how to swim, and appallingly negligent in watching to see that their children did not drown, when they were not in lessons. As far as Carolin's experience went, I think it will take her another session or two to fully warm up to the very sweet teachers Kristina, and Coco, but I imagine that after that she will have a marvelous time with all the other Seepferdchen.
As Carolin was in the pool area, Felix and I were banished to the locker room (they figured out the meddlesome parent problem over here), and I was trying to figure out what to do to keep him entertained. As I had my ipod for me, I decided to entertain him with what is now the ol' mouth-as-improvised-speakers trick, that I learned sitting around with a group of particularly bored Gutenberg students in my living room (i.e. Erin, Molly, Noah, and co) on the night of it's discovery. If you've never tried it, this is a fun experiment in itself as you basically end up using the resonating power of you mouth to amplify the sound coming out of the tiny earbuds, but today it was particularly hilarious because of Felix's reaction. He has heard me sing multiple times every single day, so the boy is very familiar with the range and style of my voice, but he was utterly confounded by the drum, guitar, and male vocals that were issuing from my mouth. I wish I had had a camera along with me so that I could have captured his expression, but just imagine extreme bewilderment on the face of an adorable ten month old, and you've got it.