Week Forty

This past week:

Managed to extend my flight back to Sydney to the latest possible date before STA travel abandons me. Now coming home the 17th of February
Christmas celebrations well and truly got underway. Every corner now turned one is met with roasted nuts and red candles. At school on Wednesday night there was free Glühwein and dodgy punch as they lit up the Christmas tree. It was a nice experience standing outside with local and exchange students alike drinking warm alcohol. Afterwards headed back to the common room with Alex and Mathias to do some work.
Thanksgiving festivities took place on Thursday night. Logan and Garrett put in a ridiculously appreciated amount of effort to bring the American tradition to Dornbirn. 40 of us joined in the student house common room and ate until very umcomfortably full. There was turkey, apple pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, raspberry pie, carrot cake, salads, ice cream, nachos, crossaints, sweet potato, mashed potato, peas, carrots, gravy, fruit, stuffing, bread, salami crackers, bruschetta and brie to name a few things. And wine, lots and lots of wine. We heard a bit about what Thanksgiving was about before digging in. Very thankful for those boys.
Had an unusually high amount of traffic on the blog from Saudi Arabia – would be interested to know who that was.
Spent time with Robert from the music studio here at school. He helped me find a soundtrack for my upcoming video project. I always have a lot of fun hanging out with him and he was very helpful!
Went for my first snow run of the season and a got a solid headache as well as falling over twice.

This past weekend:

Friday night, Maddy and I went briefly to the Dornbirn Christmarkets before having leftover pumpkin pie together with Camille (despite having declared at Thanksgiving the night earlier that there was no way we’d ever eat again.) We then watched a DVD of mine – the European Outdoor Film Tour from 2014 – which essentially is just beautifully cinematic short clips of being doing crazy stuff. EG this was one of them and is awesome.

Just after midnight, I met up with Corina, Tobi, Lena, Alex and Simon from school at Frei – a new club/bar/restaurant in the city. It’s a nice venue and the company was even nicer.
Saturday morning, Camille and I went to the markets before heading to SASU, that new boutique in Dornbirn to take some photos for them again. They’re super lovely there and I’d highly recommend you swing by if you’re in Dornbirn.
Saturday evening, I wasn’t feeling too well and was in my pyjamas ready to call it a night. I’d had tickets to Alp Con (a ski/snowboard film festival in Feldkirch atm) which I was about to give up. Got peer pressured though and ended up at Rio cinema in Feldkirch which I’m grateful for. Some great clips of some impressive athletes (despite no story line). After a drink at the bar downstairs, headed back on the train home.
For those of you who know my mum, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with her friendliness and ability to be loved by anyone and everyone she meets. This was no exception when she was in Dornbirn a couple of months ago. She met a refugee family from Syria and was invited to their home. 2 months later, Maddy and I thought it might be nice to visit them also. We knocked on their door to introduce ourselves and before we knew it were playing table soccer with our new 8 year old best friend, Asis. Over Arabic coffee and baklava, we were told about the difficulties of coming to Austria from Syria, we were told about how people would refuse to speak to them in anything but German, we were told about everything they’d lost in their move here – not only many many physical possessions but the value of their qualifications. Despite having gone through an immense amount of hardship they were ridiculously welcoming, the father telling us that he is a big bird and we are under his wing. If we ever needed somewhere to stay we could have their room and he’d sleep outside. He’d missed his train to meet up with a friend in order to welcome us and told us that helping one another is the most important thing. Through a mix of Arabic, German, English and sign language we made some really good friends that afternoon and will be over again soon to help them with some language problems (although really not qualified in German ourselves!! Feel free to assist if you are!) It made me realise that this refugee crisis is ridiculously demonised in the media and that some of the loveliest people you’ll ever meet fall into this category of “foreign threats” which we’ve so naively established.

All in all a good week.

WordPress just really screwed me over by deleting half the photos off my blog so hold tight whilst that gets resurrected. Super super painful.

Oh and phone now only focuses on the left hand side haha. Yay technology.

The business card we did for SASU