The hills ARE alive...

In Vienna for a movie and donut
stop with our friends Teo and Danylo.

...With Happy Quacks! 

Things have been very busy here, and we're all pretty amazed to see our year in Europe swiftly coming to a close! There's so much "regular life" that I haven't mentioned in the blog-- Easter celebrations, parties, classes and gatherings, dances, birthdays and day trips--there's always something new! We're currently in the "reading week," time for students to study and get ready for exams that start on Wednesday. Dad's been finishing up his classes and enjoying all sorts of Great Courses lectures and plenty of walks in the beautiful spring/summer weather.

Mom and her friend Ruta,
also Icon class teacher

Mom's icon is coming along beautifully (I'm not sure if it's finished yet?) and she's still singing with the German parish choir as well as the ITI one with Rosie and me, and has successfully finished the Catechism and our Christian Literature class. She and I had a lovely time getting lost biking in the beautiful Austrian countryside last week, and yesterday had a nice afternoon spent in the soccer field celebrating a friend's birthday with a bunch of the moms and their toddlers or baby twins. (With a few breaks to offer each other ice-cream, they passed their time discussing the likelihood of all their children dying of tick bites.)

    New day...
    Last week we had the opportunity to hike in the Alps with our friends, look around our friend Thomas' dairy farm near Salzburg and spend the night in his family's Alpine hut!

And we're off!

View from Thomas' farm.

Rosie and Claire stayed at home, while the rest of us including our friends Brenna and Magda thoroughly enjoyed the trip. We arrived in the afternoon after a stop at a beautiful Austrian Church called Maria Schutz  which is the first church I've seen in Europe with a little shrine to Saint Gemma Galgani! It was so nice to see the parts of Austria that look a lot more like what one imagines from the Sound of Music and such, not just houses and flat fields in Trumau (although those are pretty too!) but glorious mountains, beautiful valleys with the cutest villages spread out them, plenty of farmhouses and cows and flowing water (so, so blue and happily alive!)

Saying hello to the cows!

Thomas (left) and his family

and it was a bright and beautiful sunny day with tons of grass and wildflowers blowing in the wind. We made our way to Thomas' farmhouse up on a hill, and met up with the others there who had come with the ITI.

Waiting for dinner at 10pm

We took three cars with about six other people besides our van load. Thomas showed us around his house that had been rebuilt about 100 years before, but the farm has been in his family for 500 years. We got to see all their cows all lined up in the barn, get a tour of the gardens, see the tractors and calves grazing on the hillside, (the tractors weren't grazing), the wood and metal working shops and the girls had a ton of fun taking thousands of pictures of the cats wandering about. It was so interesting to get a glimpse of what a life on a farm might be like, quite different from the daily class going schedule that Thomas has adjusted to since coming to the ITI.

Jacob, Kolbe and Irene

   After a relaxing time there we piled back into the cars and drove about 10 kilometers up the hill to their lovely little Alpine hut. It was hiding up in the mountains, and the air was very cold but so fresh it makes you want to stay outside anyway. There was a spring right by the hut, and the water was very cold and fresh to drink. After setting up everybody's beds in the two bed rooms (us girls got the big upstairs room, with a hole in the floor right above the furnace thing in the little dining room downstairs--we kept that open and stayed warm), the boys started a fire outside by the spring, Magda and Jakie practiced their handstands on the hillside and took pictures of the flowers rushing through the spring water, and the rest of us either made tea and prepared dinner or stood around the campfire talking and drinking beer.

The girls' work of art.

Thomas and Jacob-who is also from Austria-cooked meat over the fire, and we had cabbage and delicious potatoes from Thomas farm, as well as fresh, warm milk from his cows for dinner. It's the typical meal in Austria: meat, potatoes and cabbage--usually a little boring, but it wasn't then! Fresh, substantial and delicious, with wonderful company, crammed around a tiny table in the hut and trying to talk over Irene, who decided she wanted to quote the entire Peter Pan play rather loudly while we ate...

Quick stop on the way to our hike

     We went out to stargaze after that, although it was rather late, and of course it was magnificent because of the remote location. Thomas led us down the road a bit to a particular stargazing place...? and wouldn't let anybody turn on any light on the way. So we "followed the smell of John's pipe" and managed not to lose anybody as we walked through the pitch dark on the mountain. While looking up at the sky, enjoying the stars and identifying constellations (or constellation) we heard Jacob say in his German accent, "Where IS the Big Diaper?" That lightened up our evening even more and provided much good material for conversation.

Irene, Jakie and Magda
having fun at the hut!

   
After a too short night's sleep we had a delicious and substantial breakfast of leftover potatoes and meat, hot milk and cream of wheat with bread and fresh butter and hot chocolate. The morning air was chilly and so fresh--never has morning cold been more appealing! Jacob and Thomas climbed up the slope and looked across the mountains with their binoculars to find out if our way was clear of snow. Apparently it was approved and so we piled into the cars and drove to the beginning of the trail. It was a beautiful drive through valleys and villages and farmland, and the weather was perfect.

Brenna and Irene--What troopers!

     It was a steep, long climb, but with fresh springs and little waterfalls everywhere, plenty of grass and plenty of snow, warm sunshine and cool breezes, we had the best of everything and made it safely to the frozen mountain lake way up in the sky. :) We had lunch there, and then our family and Magda and Brenna headed back down the mountain and the rest of us climbed the steep slope (seemingly much steeper after a break and lunch...) and did quite a bit of slipping and sliding and sinking in the snow as we tried to cross rather narrow ridges.

Every place we got to the view got more magnificent, and after deciding not to go to the peak we had originally been heading for on account of the snow and most of us not feeling up to dying that day by falling off a mountain, we made it to a "lesser" peak with a cross and a little log book. We put our names in, prayed some psalms from my psalm book, ate chocolate and listened to Thomas scold some people from Germany who also climbed up there "without the proper equipment."

Made it!

On our way down John suggested we slide down the snowy slopes rather than follow the path, so I gave my camera to someone to hold just in CASE I somehow lost control in the attempt to slide down on my feet.
Unfortunately, while asking John how to go about sliding on your feet without just falling over and rolling, the snow gave way a bit and I slid all the way down on everything but my feet. I was pretty wet, cold and happy by the end. We did a lot more sliding down the mountain, and once we got down to the lake Thomas, John and Geydre put on their swimming things and jumped into the very small part of the lake that wasn't frozen over. We warmed up fairly quickly as we descended the rest of the mountain, and got to observe a poisonous snake on the way. :) All in all the hike took us about 8 hours.
     We went back to Thomas' farm after that and then to Mass in a small parish Church near by. It was fairly cold inside, even on the warm, sunny day. It had no power at all, so there were lots of candles.

Beautiful parish church near Salzburg

Afterwards Thomas told us that the sacristan rings the big church bells by hand every day, sets up the weights to make the clock work, and somebody has to consistently pump the organ during Mass so that the organist can play. We met the sacristan and he showed us the organ, we got to pump it and play on it--it was from 1800 or so. It sounded really funny and old fashioned, and the church was so tiny and old and right in the middle of an ideal Austrian farm village tucked away in the Alps--I felt like I was in an old movie.

John, Jacob and Kolbe
Some of our travelling buddies...

     Then for some stark contrast to the romantic, old fashioned Austrian vibe we went to a Pizzaria for dinner, and had a lovely wind down, relax, try-not-to-fall-asleep-on-your-pizza time.

Enjoying our pizza after a great hike!

     In other news, our Peter Pan play was a complete success, Rosie's really helped pull logistics and sets and people together, and we had a dress rehearsal on Friday for parents and then the play on Saturday night.

Clara and Claire

Claire braided every inch of her hair into tiny little braids and looked very good with a beard (she was the pirate Smee.) Jakie got strep throat just before the play, and her voice completely left her a few times during the dress rehearsal, but the other "lost boys" covered for her and it worked out swimmingly. Irene also did fantastically in her first play ever, and although she denies it, she put on a great British accent throughout.

Peter and Wendy!

Dad took some videos, and we're hoping to get a copy of the one the school is making of the play.
     The same day as the play I went with my classmate and Latin teacher to an old Roman ruined city called Carnuntum near Vienna. The whole area is about 10 square kilometers, but in a small part of it they've rebuilt exact replicas (as far as they can tell) of the houses and villas directly on top of the foundations that still remain. They only build what they know for sure would have been there, down to which room was where and used for what, and what paintings were actually on the walls.

Roman villa in Carnuntum.

It was the furthest north Roman settlement, since apparently they crossed the Danube once and got destroyed, and so just stayed on the near end. They have people walking about in Roman attire and everything set up in the houses as it would have been (real food that I managed not to eat, blankets and cushions on the chairs, cloth for the cloth merchant...)
Mom has finished her icon! It is absolutely beautiful, and she went to a talk with one of the Byzantine deacon-priests who explained lots of the symbolism of icons, and it's interesting hearing her understanding of her own.

Good job, Mom!

She and Dad have also taken our elderly catechism teacher out to eat several times. She is close friends with Benidict XVI and apparently sends him a cat calendar every year. She did a lot of work on the catechism, and is a really charming, straightforward and loving person. She got a kick out of my Peter Pan performance, and that's what she calls me now, in and out of class.
There were two sets of twins born in our building in the last six months, so more often than not there's a baby or two in the girls' arms as they go about their school or baking. It's a happy sight!
     It's been really hot the last few days, so Irene and I have enjoyed swimming in the river right nearby.

Rose and Teo 

We found a nice, deepish area with a gentle current, so we like to hop off a bridge, sail on down and climb out and do it again. It's very refreshing especially since it's been far too cold to do that for months, and so far neither of us have died from tick bites. The weather has been especially nice for the girls who've been sleeping on the deck for months...

Rosie's classs!

                    I guess they like being able to be in the fresh air! We also had a ton of fun recently at the end of the year ITI ball.

Sleeping on the deck!

We had a lovely evening with our friends the Colvis family who invited us to a BBQ at their place, (I've often mentioned  12 year old Brenna Colvis, who is up in our flat all the time lightening up the day and making wise cracks. One of my favorites: "What has a bottom at the top?.......A LEG!"

BBQ with the Colvis family!

Cheers!