What we've been up to :)

Sorry it’s been so long since I wrote my last blog, having slow internet I barely get to do anything online. Half of the time it won’t even load things correctly, it’s a major pain in the butt. Right now it’s going really, really slow so I am typing this in word and I will copy it into my blog. Putting pictures on is what takes the longest, so there won’t be able pictures in this blog.

Dan and I haven’t been up to much, he’s been pretty busy with work and I’ve been hanging out around here. Sometimes I go to Monica’s house or we go to base and do our grocery shopping. I’ve been renting One Tree Hill from the Library and watching that, it’s a really good show. I have also been reading more. The House of Night series was recommended to me so I bought them off of Amazon. I bought 7 books for about $55 (and three of them come in hardback), so it was a pretty good deal. I am on the 4th book now, this one I have been reading for a while. The first book I finished in a day, they are so good. I think because I have been watching One Tree Hill I haven’t been reading as much, just mainly at night before bed. The house of night books are about a high school girl who gets marked and she must go to the house of night school which is a vampire finishing school. It’s really neat, I like it.

Fourth of July weekend we went back into Austria, this time we stayed in Innsbruck. The first day we were there we went into Germany and visited Neuschwanstein Castle, this is the castle Walt Disney based his Sleeping Beauty castle off of. It was amazing, the inside was beautiful beyond words. They didn’t allow us to take pictures though :( We were there the entire morning and into the afternoon and decided to drive to Garmisch on the way back into Austria. We stopped at the base there and looked around a little bit, Dan bought oil for the car because it’s a lot cheaper there than it is here. When we got back into town we walked through the park in Innsbruck and through the old town. It was a neat little town, we like it. The second day we went to the Innsbruck Zoo and took a ski lift to the top of a mountain. At the top we hiked around a little bit, ate lunch and after a few hours we came back down and walked around the town again. We had a good time, it was a nice weekend. Because our internet was working really fast in the hotel I skyped with Kristina and talked to my family through skype as well. It was nice…I wish we could do that here.

This past weekend Dan and I tried to go to Trieste, it’s a town that sits on the ocean south of here. It usually takes about two and a half hours to get there, but we didn’t make it very far. We got on the autostrada and were on it for about an hour when we came to a stop. Traffic was backed up because of the toll…people were stopped to pay. We were in very slow stop and go traffic for 2 hours. In that 2 hours we went 9 miles. To make things worse we were in Dan’s car, which is a stick shift and it does have AC, but when it gets hot the clutch in it poops out. And that’s what happened. He would start to go and the whole car would shake and make an awful noise and it just kept getting worse. We turned off the AC and that helped a little bit, not much, but it was 95 degrees out that day. So, we were basically sitting in a car with no breeze because we were barely moving, at times we were going uphill which was even worse for his car. Once we finally got up to the toll, we payed and got off at the first exit and turned around. We decided because IKEA was right there to go there and get some lunch and look around. It was pretty frustrating and from what I understand pretty typical for the roads in Italy in the summer time. I just couldn’t believe it was backed up that much…You’d think they would just lift the gates and let people go through and get caught up, but they didn’t.

We are trying to get out and do stuff around the area here, but with the heat and traffic it makes it a little difficult. There are some caves around somewhere close, I think we might try and do that this weekend, should be nice and cool in there :)

I talked to the internet guy again, he said it would be the end of June…so when that came I called him again. It’s not hooked up, now they are wanting him to get signatures from people in the town, he said if he can get 40 signatures then he can get a tower. When he came to get our signature last week he said he already had the 40 signatures so we was going to turn them in, but he didn’t know how long it was going to take. He said he was really busy and unsure when he would be able to get to doing it. So, we are still in lingo when it comes to that. I really wish we would have picked a place with ADSL, we are both kicking ourselves in the butt for choosing this apartment. No internet, the car doesn’t go in the garage, our whole apartment is on some safety thing so the breaker goes off all of the time, even when it doesn’t exceed the max power. When we use our oven, it pops our breaker when it gets up to the temperature and then about every 3 minutes until you turn the oven off, I wish it had more AC units for these hot days and finally…the barking dog, that barks all night, every night. The other night a big storm came through here and it was pretty cool out the next day even the next night. So we decided to keep the windows open and save money not running the AC unit upstairs…but after an hour of the nonstop barking dog, Dan got up and closed the windows and turned on the AC. When we woke up the next morning it was very warm up there, I turned it off and opened the windows because it was cooler outside than it was inside with the AC on. I just wish I knew where it was coming from and I’m surprised that no one has said anything to the people, especially people who live closer to the dog. Just drives us nuts because we know when the cooler weather comes back around that dang dog will still be out there barking, all night.

We will see, I can’t wait until fall comes and leaves start changing and this heat goes away, I just wish that barking dog would go away with it. October we will probably start our travel down to Rome, we want to wait until the tourists leave and when it’s not so hot. Until then we will probably just hang around here, doing things close to home.

Once again, sorry for not posting in while…at least my post is long.. :) I will try and get better about it. Hope everyone is doing well!

Oink, Oink

Last Sunday we went to the proscuitto festival in San Daniele, which is about an hour away from here. Dan and I had been to this town before, it was right after we moved here and were out exploring. Monica and her family came with us, it was a fun day.



We walked around a bit, which was a lot of uphill walking, so I burned some calories before eating lunch :) They had tents set up selling different things. The first thing I bought.....CHEESE! I love Cheese. The different tents were selling olive oil (people were actually drinking it to taste it!), Lemoncello, dried fruit, sausage, purses, clothing, etc. We got some dried fruit at one of the stations, we got strawberries and kiwi...It was good.

They also had pigs there. I thought this was sad. Looking at them..knowing they were going to be killed. They also had little baby pigs...they were so cute.



We then walked up to the center of town, that's where they had the proscuitto and the tables to eat. There were quite a bit of people up there eating proscuitto and drinking beer having themselves a merry ole time. We each got a plate of Proscuitto which came with breadstick type things and a water. It was good, just different from what we eat everyday.





All in all, it was a good day. Lots of walking, but that's good for you! On the way out we stopped and got some gelato :)

Dan has a 3 day weekend for the 4th of July, so we are going to head back into Austria and stay just outside of Innsbruck. We are going to go back into Germany and check out some castles and explore the area down there. I will post pictures and a blog when we get back!