Christmas Season Begins

Thanksgiving's over and we've had snow so Christmas season has officially begun. This past weekend was actually pretty busy. I saw two movies that I'd recommend to everyone out there: The Social Network and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, on Saturday night my soccer team had a fundraiser where we sold Punsch, and Sunday was the Vienna soccer derby between FK Austria Wien and Rapid Wien but my team lost 0:1 in a snowy match.

On Monday I had an interview with the personnel company Elan IT, which specializes in finding jobs for IT companies. This seems to be the way most companies fill positions in Austria, where a company wants a new employee and instead of advertising the position themselves, they contract a personnel company, who advertises the position and interviews prospective employees. This is good in one sense in that I conducted the interview on Monday with Elan IT, and they'll submit applications for me to several positions they think I'm qualified for. I would still have to do an interview with the actual company that would hire me though, which coincidentally I'm doing tomorrow morning with the company I mentioned in my last post from Wolfsgraben, Austria.

Most fun though is the ton of snow we've received in the past few days. Here are a couple pictures, first of the inner garden of our building, and second of the street out front.



Finally, I saw another awesome concert last night from another of the artists in my Current Music list, this time it was M.I.A. who did a show at Gasometer. It's a much, much bigger venue than where Marlene and I saw The Futureheads, but still not a stadium or anything. It's bigger than First Ave in Minneapolis, I'd estimate there were almost 2000 people there? It's difficult to say. I went with Marlene's sister Vroni, since it was a school night, and we couldn't get too close to the stage but it was still quite a spectacle with 3 giant TV screens showing strange animation loops, a blinding light show (especially the extensive use of synchronized strobe lights), and the randomness of M.I.A. who at one point bodysurfed in the audience, got down and ran through the crowd to perform in the back of the room, and also brought 50+ audience members on stage to dance with her for one song.