I recently had a good friend come to stay for a week and half in our tiny little town. A word for the wise – that is too long for most in our tiny little town. Being autumn and getting colder, although the weather wasn’t terrible, there is still a limit to what we could do. On days where the sun takes until lunchtime to pierce the fog, it still feels dismal and cold and motivation is low.
I went into the purchase of my first PAX system from Ikea completely oblivious. I was just so excited to be getting extra space for my clothes, I didn’t think of how much work it would be to put it together.
Call me weird, but I’ve always enjoyed donating blood. I could say that I do it because I want to help people, and that certainly has to be part of it, but I think perhaps it’s mostly to do with the fact that since I was a kid I’ve always watched my dad donate. I have good memories of going into South Melbourne with him and watching him undergo the process, waiting eagerly to share his milkshake and sugar lollies afterwards.
Or maybe I’ve always just been a sucker for free food.
I love my music. I have spent ridiculous amounts of time creating playlists and organising my music files to ensure everything is exactly perfect. But sometimes I crave more variety than is available in my personal library… and when that happens, I always turn to Radio Paradise.
I never understood why other people hated going to the dentist. I always shot through appointments in record time with little more than a poke and a scrape. I never understood until recently… when I received my first (surprise!) filling.
And it was a surprise, because I had no idea what was going on at the time.
I once owned three chickens. They were a by-product of the only reason I studied biology: the project where each student receives a freshly hatched chicklet with the aim of ‘imprinting’ (basically making it think you’re its mother) it in the first week of its life by carrying it everywhere you go in a shoebox. When the week ended, you could choose to either keep your chick, or send it back to the Stegalls’ factory, where its projected lifespan was very short!
When I made the decision to remain, for an unspecified amount of time, in Austria, I broke a promise.
I broke a promise to my parents, and along with that I broke a promise to my best friend in the world – my dog.
The weekend after we arrived back in Austria from our Sri Lanka/Australia trip earlier this year, Thomas turned up with a giant hunk of lamb and we decided to celebrate our return with a Sunday Roast. I was, naturally, head cook, and as I babysat the baking meat, I started sorting through the photos from our trip.
But the further into the afternoon I got, the more wine I drank, and after a while I was unable to do anything useful. And so, facing an excess of random monkey pictures from Sri Lanka, I decided that it was high time I learnt how to make memes. Here are the results, and I think they’re funny, even if no one else does!
I’ve visited Zagreb a couple of times before, but the most recent trip was to celebrate my cousin’s wedding. Not only was it great to have a few days away, it was a privilege to witness the cementing of another successful multi-country relationship! My cousin was born in New Zealand, but having a Swiss father meant he relocated there in his 20s, meeting his now-wife, and eventually moving to Croatia. It’s complicated but awesome that I have a relative that lives so close (only 2.5 hours away).
Another brilliant thing was that my Dad and two of my aunties also joined in the celebratory-travel-party from Australia. It made for a great time to catch up, speak English (and occasionally try to understand Swiss-German, courtesy of the Swiss side of the family) and relax.
German is not an easy language, but then neither is English. And kudos for everyone who didn’t grow up in an English-speaking country, because that means they probably handle multiple languages on a daily basis.
Read on for some of my favourite, commonly used mis-translations that Austrians often say in English.
