Birthdays while travelling seem to take place at two extremes. You either find yourself among a bunch of awesome people, and the fact it is your birthday propels everyone into party mode resulting an epic night. Or it’s lonely, in a city among people you haven’t connected particularly well with, which then becomes a half-hearted kind of tragic day.
Damn… what have we gone and done?
After more than a year-long search, and many new discoveries along the way, the inevitable has finally happened – we’ve gone and bought ourselves a house.
A few weeks ago my company held a firm-wide meeting discussing our future growth direction. The content is not important, what is important is that the meeting was (obviously) completely in German.
And then the most surprising thing – I actually understood a lot of it!
Ok, the first part anyway – but that was a good hour!
The town I live in boasts around 25,000 people – that’s in the city proper – if you take in all the outlying areas there’s many more – in Europe one small city is never very far from the next.
Thomas and I have been house-hunting for over a year now, and so far, no such luck. I can count on one hand the number of houses I’ve actually considered as serious possibilities. So here’s what I’ve discovered about house-hunting in a small Austrian town.
My 92 year old grandmother recently had a fall and broke her leg. A broken leg is no fun, let alone when you’re 92. But she’s built from strong stock, my grandmother, so she pushed through the operation and is now part-terminator where the bone used to be. It’s easy to joke and look at the positives after the fact, but it was a tense few weeks for everyone as she endured through the surgery and the risks that come afterwards.
an aussie in austria 