Another Public Holiday

Thursday was another one of Austria's public holidays, meaning I also had today off.

Yesterday we went to an IAESTE barbecue on Donauinsel , an artificial island built as a product of digging the canals used to control flooding and generate electricity. The island is just one giant park, with 30km of bike trails, beaches, and barbecue pits.

Thursday morning was spent getting to, and through, the ONLY grocery store which was open (in a city of almost 2million people), because MA (Canada), Henrik (Sweden), and I forgot that holidays = everything closed.

We arrived at the island around 3pm, and were some of the first people there. The BBQ was fun, with plenty of sun, food, beer, and volleyball. We met a bunch of new people, and I discovered that I can still more-or-less understand spoken French, but cannot speak it to save my life. We stayed until about 7:30 then took the subway back, and crashed.

This morning Henrik had to work so MA and I got our cell phones all sorted out, went to the library, then ventured north across the river to IKEA. One nice thing about IKEA is that nothing is ever really written in English, even in Canada, and the stores are all set up identically, so, if you swapped the Euro signs with dollar signs we could have been in Ottawa. MA and I picked up a bunch of kitchen stuff that we're going to share, and some random stuff like sheets, glasses, and a pillow.

In case your interested, my phone number is 0681 1044 7005. When phoning from Canada it's 011-43-681-1044-7005. The great thing about European cellphone plans is that all incoming calls are completely free, and outgoing calls are pay-as-you-go for only 7 cents/minute with no service fees or expiry dates. The only thing that I ask is that you figure out the time in Austria before you phone. For example, a well intentioned (likely intoxicated) phone call from Kingston at 11pm would wake me up at 5am (not fun).

Tomorrow or Sunday I'm meeting up with Anna from Queen's whom I iConed (worked) with, so I'll show her and her friend around the parts of the city I've shown you already.

You'll have to be patient for more cool photos until the week after next (~Monday the 18th) when I get back from Budapest.

This Sunday marks one month in Vienna, time flies.