Klagenfurt Thanksgiving 2009

Hello Friends and Family!

So I've fallen into the no-update-for-weeks rut, but my lack of timeliness has left me with a bunch of fun events to chronicle!

Firstly, since the end of October, the lovely Klagenfurtians have been adorning our downtown area with Christmas spirit, culminating in the "Chriskindlmarkt" that has taken over the square where the Lindwurm (dragony thing in the center) resides. The square is full of adorable little log huts, selling anything that your Christmas heart could desire. This also adds a fun night-life factor, because from the early evening to 11 or midnight, the vendors offer yummy hot spiced wine, beer and ciders! Lina introduced Kristina and I to the cider, and we warmed ourselves after an evening practice.

Last weekend we played a match in Zilina, Slovakia, which is a lovely 8-hour bus ride away from Klagenfurt. After an unfortunate block move, Kristina ended up with a sprained ankle before warm-ups even ended, so we didn't really start the match out on a good note. We took the first set but dropped the next 3, and got back on the bus for a somber post-loss ride home.

Last week flew by, and we had some great weather that I tried to capture in pictures of downtown. Klagenfurt is a beautiful city as-is, but the Christmas lights and the smell of roasted chestnuts make it even more picturesque!

Friday brought a surprise in the form of Lauren, Kristina's friend from Canada who has been Euro-tripping for the last 3 weeks. She's come into our lives as a third roommate, and we're loving it!

On Saturday we played the team from Zilina again, at home this time. After a morning serve and pass practice, we enjoyed a delicious meal of Kärntner Nudel with our local friend Matthias, who helped us pick the best flavors at the market downtown. The pregame meal set us up for success, because with Kristina playing again and an awesome team effort, we managed to pull out our first win in 7 weeks, and we beat Zilina 3-0!

Saturday night we met the volleyball boys downtown for the parade of Krampus (scary devil people that come after the bad children at Christmas time in Austria), and Lauren and I took the opportunity to grab a few snapshots with them...

After a fun night of dancing on Saturday, Lauren, Kristina and I woke up early to start cooking our Thanksgiving feast. This picture captures how great we were feeling on such little sleep while chopping onions, and I hope everyone appreciated the pain we were in while preparing the food that was consumed so rapidly later that night...

We had invited over the 7 other North Americans in town (one American on the basketball team, 5 Canadians and an American on the men's volleyball team) and had put out an open invite to some other friends in town, so we knew that we were cooking for a crowd. Add that to the fact that our kitchen is just big enough for 2 miniature people to squeeze in, and also that the Billa does not offer the 17 options for every item like the neighborhood Safeway does, and we were definitely facing a challenge.. Fortunately, the three of us combined to work some magic, and everything turned out great!

On the menu: Mashed potatoes, rosemary roasted potatoes, sweet potato casserole (do we like potatoes much??), stuffing, macaroni and cheese, gravy, pork chops, salad, sweet potato pie and apple crumble with ice cream. We ate ourselves silly (at one point I had to go lie down for fear that I might explode) and thoroughly enjoyed Thanksgiving Klagenfurt style!

We spent Monday recovering from the feast, and Tuesday brought another eventful German lesson. Today we had a Euro-Cup match against a team from the Azores (island chain off the coast of Portugal), and ended up losing in 4 sets. The exciting part is that we are headed to play them at their home next Tuesday! We leave on Sunday night for Munich, head from there to Lisbon, then take a boat a third of the way to the East Coast to arrive at the tiny island where we're playing!

I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving back home, and that you all felt just as gluttonous as I did! I miss you all and would love to hear updates :) (acmaylo@gmail.com!)

XOXO

Anna

Pretty Sunsets = Delicate Shades of Pink and Blue

Hello Friends and Fam!

The past week and a half has brought some beautiful weather to Klagenfurt, with blue skies in the day and cloudy evenings, the perfect recipe for spectacular sunsets. Kristina and I ventured out one afternoon to find a sunset lookout point, but somehow managed to miss the sunset during our adventure. We documented our pretty town anyway, and we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for the lookout..

Last week's match in Rijeka was a difficult one, they're a strong team and we're playing with somewhat reduced numbers. (I hate that excuse, but it's difficult to look across the net at a stacked starting lineup and 7 gals on the bench, then to turn around to our own bench and see one lonely ranger holding it down! Fortunately three of our girls returned to action early in the week, and hopefully we'll be staying healthy this time around :) We ended up losing 0-3 (boo, hiss), but Kristina, Rosa and I took our chance to jump-photo in the gym prior to our departure from Croatia post-match.

The week was pretty low-key, we learned lots of German (ok, maybe not "lots," but enough to make my brain hurt) and cooked some fanatastic meals, which are the main non-volleyball activities that keep us busy nowadays. We also had some craft-time fun with printing out a bunch of pictures that have been accumulated on my computer, it was really fun sorting through memories going back to senior year at Santa Clara through my adventures in Switzerland, this summer in Santa Clara, and now in K-furt!

Saturday was pretty monumental, namely because it marked the 23rd anniversary of my arrival on this planet! I woke up to find that Kristina had put little birthday messages up all over the house, from one on the microwave celebrating birthday oatmeal to one on the bathroom mirror reassuring me of my birthday beauty... it was adorable!

After our pregame serve and pass practice that morning, Birgit, Sophie, Ellie and Samira came over to deliver a large pile of presents wrapped in tin-foil, which turned out to be individually wrapped ankle socks (they hate the way Americans wear tube socks!). Then they presented me with an awesome poem, which I tried hard to read accurately. Samira documented it, and here's a little intro to my painstaking attempts to learn German:

As you can see, I'm majorly struggling, but the poem was really cute and they definitely made it a special birthday afternoon.

We played the team from Vienna that night, and ended up losing a tight match in 5 games. The team from Vienna is our biggest rival in Austria, mostly because they also play in MEVSA (the international league we're playing in now) and because we often lose to them in the Austrian Championship finals match. After a poor showing in the first 2 sets, we came back in the 3rd and 4th, and it was really frustrating to let it slip through our fingers in the 5th! Next time..

After the match, I didn't have much time to feel sorry for myself, because several of the club's representatives came up to give me a bouquet of flowers, and the crowd proceeded to sing "Happy Birthday" to me! It was really cute, and by the time we got to the locker room, I was smiling again..

After feasting with the girls post-match, where they sang "Happy Birthday" one more time, I came home to commence birthday celebration evening. All of our teammates were playing in an Austrian Cup match the next day, which mean that they couldn't come out to celebrate. Therefore we spent most of the night hanging out at home with a couple of them, which was fine by me! When we finally did make it to the town, we ended up meeting some of the volley guys, who capped off the birthday celebration evening by helping us hold down the dance floor at a local bar. We danced until the wee hours of the morning, and I think I could almost see the sun coming up as I got ready for bed..

My last birthday wish was fulfilled on Sunday morning, when Kristina made a delicious batch of banana pancakes (has anyone ever shared that hangover cure with you? Try it!!). All in all, it was a wonderful birthday weekend, and I feel really lucky to be surrounded by people who helped make my dreiundzwansig-rd? (23rd) so special!!

I hope you all had a wonderful my-birthday weekend too!

xoxo

Anna

Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän

Dearest friends and family,

Yep, that's a real word in German! During our lesson yesterday, Julia explained to Kristina and I how the German language is unique in that one can string together nouns and verbs in one word. In this case, it's a word that means the captain of a steam-ship on the Danube River. Obvious, isn't it?

This last week has flown by! We lost a heartbreaker in 5 sets last Saturday, which put somewhat of a damper on our Halloween plans. Kristina and I had planned to be ballerinas, but the loss combined with the cold weather was enough to extinguish any flames of motivation! We went into town anyway, to find out that Halloween isn't celebrated nearly as widely here as it is in the states.. No trick or treating (I know, what's up with that??), very few people were dressed up, and no Jaime Lee Curtis screaming on ABC Family. Dang.

Nichole arrived on Monday night for the last leg of her European journey, and it was awesome to have her in town for a couple days! After so much traveling, I think she was OK with laying low while she was here, so we spent many hours hanging out reading (I'm on to the last Harry Potter, she was finishing A Thousand Splendid Suns) and attempting to watch movies online (I don't think I'm meant to do things that are illegal, it never works for me!!). I got word that she got home OK yesterday, and Klagenfurt misses her already!

One of our fun projects this week was to bake bananen brot (banana bread) and "American cookies" (chocolate chip, obvi) with Rosa, our adorable 16-year-old teammate. On Tuesday I got to watch as Kristina taught Rosa how to smush up bananas and wait patiently as the bread smells take over the kitchen far before it's ready to eat, and Wednesday brought chocolate chip cookie deliciousness. Rosa is on her way to becoming a regular Martha Stewart!

The weather here is becoming more and more winter-y. No snow yet, but I'm waiting to wake up to blankets of white covering Klagenfurt's rooftops. It's going to happen soon!

We're off to Rijeka, Croatia for a match tonight. They're one of the better teams in our league, which should make it interesting!

Love you and miss you! And here's our team's site if you're interested: http://atsc.at

XOX

Anna