Frohe Weihnachten!

It's been a while since I've posted so I'll try to catch you all up on what's been happening lately.

My job has been going well. It seems like it's more administrative assistant work rather than IT administration, and it's a struggle every day to speak German, but I've just got to keep on pushing through.

I celebrated Christmas here, which was actually the second time I've done so, so it wasn't entirely strange to spend the holiday away from my American family. We definitely saw enough Austrian family to make up it. We spent Christmas Eve in Vienna, just Marlene and I. We cooked ourselves a delicious dinner on our raclette grill, then we sang some English/German songs, then opened presents. I got a nice watch to replace the one that broke when it fell out of my pocket at a soccer practice during the Fall and the watch face broke. I also got Football Manager 2011 which is a super addictive soccer club managing game. I'm currently still playing the 2010 version of the game because I've got a season with Austria Wien that I can't quit yet.

On Christmas day we traveled to Neusiedl am See and had a great dinner with Marlene's immediately family. After the dinner we played board games all night. The next day we went to an Aunt's house and had dinner with all of her family who lives in Neusiedl. We again played board games afterward, mostly an extremely long game of the Settlers of Catan, which was won by Marlene's cousin Wolfgang. Then on Monday I had to work again so we came back to Vienna, and the Christmas season officially ended.

Now, we're looking forward to the New Year! We're going to spend it at a friend of a friend's place and hopefully play some more Settlers of Catan. If I don't win then it'll definitely be a bad omen going into the new year...

Back to School

Marlene and I both started class on Monday. She's back teaching English and I began a month long German course as a refresher before trying to get a real job. My class is pretty interesting. I'm the only guy out of 8 students and everyone is from a different country. There's a Moldovan, Romanian (from Transylvania even!), Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, Indian, Ukrainian, and of course me. Most of the others can already speak English along with their mother tongues so that's a bit annoying to me that everyone is there learning their third language. After I'm completely comfortable with German I think I'd like to go back to learning Spanish. I'm also glad the USA is changing in this respect due to so many Spanish-speaking immigrants. Having American children grow up bilingual is only going to make them more intelligent and give them better job opportunities in the future. It also makes learning a third, fourth, etc. language much easier.

To get back to my school, it's pretty low key. It's just 9-12, Monday-Thursday, for 4 weeks. It's very strange to have homework again after being out college for over 3 years, but I do like it. It's good that I have to work on my German at least a little bit. I try to speak with Marlene as much as I can, but if I can't figure out how to say something after a few seconds, I'll always revert to English.

I had another training session last night FC Adrenalin. Turner left some comments asking if they had a website, which they do: http://www.fc-adrenalin.at/index.php. I'm not sure what league they're in, but all the games are in Vienna. I'm pretty sure they're not in the official Austrian league system, so it's not like they could keep winning promotion and eventually get to the Austrian Bundesliga. They did however win their league and promotion last year.

The other hobby I've just taken up is creating a custom map for the board game Ticket To Ride. I'm working on a custom map using Austria and its neighboring countries. Below is a picture of the work I've done so far. I've got the full size map printed out and a smaller sheet of paper with my plan for the cities and routes.